NEW YORK - With Internet users increasingly going mobile, a major challenge for Facebook will be trying to make money from its massive global presence in a more complex mobile space. Facebook, which makes most of its money from advertising, says more than half -- 488 million -- of its 901 million members access the service from a mobile phone or tablet. Of these, 83 million use only mobile devices instead of computers. But while 82 percent of Facebook revenue comes from ads, the company acknowledges that it gets little income from the mobile space. "We have historically not shown ads to users accessing Facebook through mobile apps or our mobile website," the California firm said in a filing for its initial public offering. "In March 2012, we began to include sponsored stories in users' mobile news feeds. However, we do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven." Facebook says a big issue looking ahead is being able to get mobile revenue and that its revenue "may be negatively affected unless and until we are successful with monetization strategies for mobile usage of Facebook." Most analysts note that advertising has not yet become adapted to mobile devices in the same way it has on computers. "Last time I checked, mobile phones had really small screens," said Michael Pachter of Wedbush Securities. Van Baker, an analyst with the Gartner consultancy, said so-called monetisation will be critical for Facebook, which has "some catching up to do" with firms like Google and Apple. Baker said Facebook needs to find mobile ads that are "not intrusive" and pointed to Google and Apple as using a type of mobile banner ad that "takes up a very small amount of screen real estate." Google is seen as having a strong mobile platform, and recently decided to integrate its mobile, search and other services in an effort to offer more targeted ads, a move that drew criticism from privacy advocates.
