On one hand, the company posted impressive growth in its TV, cable and movie businesses. These segments resulted in a $210 million year-over-year quarterly earnings increase and adjusted earnings per share of $0.39 which is better than the $0.34 analysts had predicted.

At the same time, the company announced a 43 percent decline in its publishing business and a quarterly charge of $87 million related to the UK phone hacking settlement.

On an afternoon earnings call, News Corp executives said that about 85 percent of the charge was for lawyers and advisers and the rest for legal settlements. They added that they could not go into details about future settlements but that the “priority is to make this right.” The company says it spent $104 million in 2011 on costs related to the investigation.

The hacking-related charges were not included in the publishing category where the company’s UK and Australia newspapers are experiencing collapsing revenues. The company also said it expected income from its UK newspapers to drop $150 million in the coming year.

Publishing reported second quarter segment operating income of $218 million, a $162 million or 43% decrease compared to the $380 million reported a year ago, reflecting lower advertising revenues at the Australian newspapers and the integrated marketing services business, as well as the absence of contributions from the closure of The News of the World in the U.K.

Analysts, however, appeared less interested in the scandal than in the company’s surging TV and entertainment businesses. The strong performance in these segments was driven in part by the popularity of Fox (NSDQ: NWS) News, FX cable and hit movies like Rio and an Alvin and the Chipmunks.

News Corp also enjoyed strong results from its affiliate BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) which posted improved quarterly income of $174 million compared to $109 million one year ago.

The company also said it expects a reinvigorated performance from Dow Jones as a result of a new CEO, a strong brand and new digital platforms.

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For the year, the company swung to a £75.9 million net income from a £141.4 million loss a year earlier, as annual revenue rose three percent to £4 billion.

Virgin doubled sign-ups to its new TiVo (NSDQ: TIVO) PVR, now at a total 435,000 - but, though it increased its TV subscribe base between October and December, it lost 0.4 percent of its TV subscribers compared with the previous year.

The TiVo box is a big improvement from its predecessor but is still suffering from some quirks, still doesn’t offer some baseline features its predecessor did (like BBC Red Button) and is slow to roll out promised over-the-top services except for Spotify.

Virgin TV customers are now averaging 90 million VOD views per month on their set top boxes through a combination of recordings and hosted on-demand services, exceeding a billion total in 2011 (up 14 percent from 2010).

The company’s strategy is to cater to what it says is growing, voracious demand for digital entertainment and information - in part through its TiVo box and in part by increasing speeds of its broadband service, with which it has a competitive advantage against most copper-wire services by virtue of being fibre optic.

Release.

The plants will remain operational now for “smartphone product customization.” The news comes amidst unconfirmed reports that the company is planning to curtail its Symbian lineup after the release of the next model.

Nokia (NYSE: NOK) says that the transfer will result in the loss of 4,000 jobs in total, and the reductions will take place through the end of 2012.

Nokia does not outline how much the move to Asia will mean in terms of money saved, but this is a decision that has been some time in the making: these were plants that were spared in the last round of cuts under CEO Stephen Elop.

Since then, Nokia has reported yet more declines in its smartphone shipments, mainly around its legacy Symbian platform. The company is now gradually moving to making more of its smartphone portfolio based on Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform.

Now, Nokia says that the move is being made to put the manufacturing bases closer to where the different components are being made for those smartphones. That is a move we have seen from many other companies—and was the subject of a series of stories recently concerning Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) in China and the role of Foxconn in that business.

The move to make these plants focused on customization, meanwhile, points to some focus that Nokia does seem to maintain on its software and services for its devices—a crucial part of the company’s differentiation as it moves more and more to a platform being used by its competitors as well. Others that make Windows Phone devices include Samsung and HTC.

The news comes amidst other reports about Nokia that claim the company is planning to curtail its Symbian lineup after the next model comes out.

Symbian is gradually being phased out for Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, but Nokia had originally said it would support the OS until 2016, and that could still be the case even if it stopped making devices based on it. Nokia transferred the operation of Symbian to Accenture last year.

A spokesperson from Nokia told paidContent that the article was “speculative at best” and would not comment on device rumor or speculation:

“As we have previously said Symbian continues to be an important part of our portfolio and going forward it will play a more focused role as we accelerate our transition to Windows Phone,” he said. “We remain fully committed to the platform through 2016, which means on-going software support as we go forward.”

The company is currently rolling out an update to Symbian, Belle, and the devices remain popular in the Middle East, Russia and India, even as they have lost out to Android-based devices, Apple’s iPhone and even RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) in other markets.

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The site clocked a whopping 99 million unique browsers in January, it said, citing its own Omniture (NSDQ: OMTR) logs - 77 percent up from the previous year and 15 percent up from the previous month. It is not yet profitable, thanks to growth investment.

Relative to its burgeoning audience and relative to rivals, Mail Online’s income has often appeared small. Though actual figures were not given on Wednesday, Mail Online and stablemate Metro.co.uk together made £19 million through 2010/11, according to a previous disclosure. But that is partly because, unlike peers, DMGT reports the sites’ results separately from a whole set of supporting classifieds sites that make the bulk of its digital money and which make Mail Online look small in isolation.

Those classified sites - including Jobsite, Motoring.co.uk and the Digital Property Group - appear to be recovering from the economic downturn’s battering they faced in 2011, with eight percent quarterly revenue growth and a “solid performance” from the property sites, DMGT says.

Across formats, revenue for Associated Newspapers, the national division in which the Mail sits, is now stable compared with last year, helped by the digital growth off-setting a “weak” print ad market.

But, in DMGT’s Northcliffe regional newspaper division, revenues fell nine percent because the publisher has moved some daily titles to weekly and because ad revenue is a tenth below 2010 rates. The publisher finds itself hiking cover prices to make up for lost sales and continuing to cut costs - it lopped off 12 percent of costs in the last year, including shedding three percent of its staff.

DMGT’s real engine is B2B, not consumer, information, whose revenue rose three percent.

Digital circulation and advertising revenue growth of 51 percent from the previous year came thanks to Future having pushed 65 of its titles to iTunes Store upon Newsstand’s launch early in October.

The result is finally an encouraging sign of light at the end of the tunnel for legacy media businesses which have spent years attempting to transition their efforts from analogue to digital.

Future CEO Mark Wood: “We are starting to see a significant change in the shape of the business as our digital innovation enables us to reach entirely new consumers in global digital markets.”

Future’s UK revenue for the quarter still fell by two percent, but that was mostly from the loss of a separate customer publishing contract, Future reported in Wednesday’s interim earnings disclosure.

Now, for some, the reality may be dawning that, despite many digital products reaping owners dimes rather than dollars when compared with print equivalents, publishing them at scale can nevertheless return a company to pre-digital revenue growth rates.

As paidContent reported in January, Future’s free container apps for its tablet editions have been downloaded nearly 10 million times since Newsstand’s October launch, generating individual sales of over 430,000 magazines during the period.

Forty percent of tablet edition sales are subscriptions, but some of them may be short-term renewals.

“Print sales will be challenging, but we expect digital revenue to maintain a vigorous growth rate,” the company added in its market disclosure on Wednesday.

In the U.S., Future has been more challenged by the more rapid evaporation of print magazine circulations. But, after the board jettisoned CEO Stevie Spring and its finance director in October, replacement Wood has tackled the problem by selling Future’s U.S.-facing music magazines for up to $3 million and by committing to launch U.S. versions of its Radar web portals, starting with TechRadar. Cost cuts have now offset U.S. revenue falls, Wood reports.

The company did not specify print circulation trends.

For Lagardere, which operates several imprints including the flagship Hachette, e-books grew to make up six percent of total 2011 publishing sales. In the October-to-December Q4, that was 20 percent in the U.S., 10 percent in UK.

Hachette’s total U.S. book sales revenue grew 12.8 percent thanks to strong bestsellers withstanding Borders’ bankruptcy. But even Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, for which Hachette has some territorial rights, did not stop UK sales slipping 4.5 percent - something Lagardere blamed on the collapse of Australia’s Borders operator, REDgroup.

Lagardere said the U.S. sales growth was “despite the impact of e-books, which generate lower net sales per unit but higher margin”. It did not specify sales numbers by volume.

In contrast, the publisher reported: “In France, new e-readers were launched in the autumn but have not triggered a breakthrough in the market yet.”

Lagardere group revenue fell 0.2 percent (like-for-like), with stable performances from its magazine and TV businesses and from its print news distribution business, plus 10 percent growth from its talent management division thanks to the upcoming Euro 2012 and Olympic Games events.

But Lagardere forecasts a profit fall of up to 12 percent for the full year. And it said the worsening economy plus an expected poor autumn performance from its talent management division and a dip in shares of its Canal+ TV company will force it to record full-year impairment losses of around €900 ($1173.78/£745.29) million.

Release

The Dublin- and Rome-based company is buying Cidade Internet, a Brazilian portal which publishes 10 popular websites and other blogs inluding Fofocando, Automovel and Das Marias.

Formerly known as GoAdv, Populis operates the Nanopublishing and Blogosfere blog networks, has built up through acquiring Italy’s Blogo.it network from Dada, Germany’s Mokono network. It also owns Excite Europe, the Better Deals repository of user-created consumer guides and the Koego blog platform. In all, the company sels ads against the thousands of articles contributed by its hundreds of users each month across what is now a portfolio of several hundred websites.

Brazil’s consumer internet economy is taking off, with online ad spend surpassing that in the UK in 2011 (source and more data: IAB Brasil).

Cidade’s properties will be fully integrated under the Populis banner. Populis is gaining Cidade’s Rio and Sao Paulo offices, intends to open another this year and add 30 staff.

By trying to operate so strongly in non-English languages, Populis claims to avoid the “Demand Media clone” tag - complementarity that could ultimately make for an exit to such a group.

The Charles Zhang-led company, which operates the Sogou search site and Changyou online gaming business, saw Q4 online advertising revenues grow 51 percent from a year earlier to $101 million, including a 248 percent rise for Sogou to $23 million.

Co-president Belinda Wang: “In 2011, the internet population in China exceeded 500 million and we witnessed a continuing trend where marketing spending by brand advertisers has been shifting from offline to online.”

The trend is lifting more than just Sohu. According to iResearch, 2011 Chinese internet advertising revenue rose 57.3 percent to surpass newspaper print advertising on 51.19 billion yuan ($8.11 billion), according to iResearch, which predicts 100 billion in online ad sales in 2013.

Sohu’s operating profit fell 26 percent to $49 million on higher video investment.

{data_set="30"}

Release

The company is gearing up to start inserting “featured stories” into people’s mobile feeds—effectively, marketing-led posts—which could start appearing as soon as early March. The date and news of the launch comes from the FT, which cites several people familiar with Facebook’s planning as its source.

Since filing its S-1 for an initial public offering last week, there has been a lot of speculation on how, exactly, mobile will fit into Facebook’s money-making picture longer term. The company was very sober in its description of its mobile business—usage is growing faster than even desktop engagement, but there’s no money in that growth yet, it admitted.

That was something of a bum note in a document that otherwise dazzles with its growth story to date.

If the FT report is true, it could mark the first step in Facebook’s strategy to change that and start to make marketing dollars out of its 425-million active mobile users, and take a portion of a mobile ad market that is going to top $2 billion in the U.S. alone this year.

Facebook still has a long way to go before its mobile presence—via the mobile web and apps—is a mirror, or even enhanced, version of what it offers on the desktop. However, it does look like there may be also some developments underfoot there as well, in the form of app buttons appearing on Facebook’s mobile web site.

Meanwhile, the news of “featured stories” appears to be a development on a story from last week, which quoted Paul Gelb, head of mobile for agency Razorfish, saying that his company was trialling rich-media mobile advertising with Facebook.

Facebook may well be looking into more classic display ads for its mobile interfaces, but in any event Gelb later clarified that he was referring to “rich media featured stories”, not ads.

But if featured stories are what are in play here, Facebook gave nothing away in its own statement to paidContent: “We want to clarify that we are not working with any agency to create paid ads on our mobile platform,” a spokesperson said in an email.

Even so, the past few days are not the first time that the subject of Facebook mobile sponsored stories have come up: in December, Bloomberg also noted that Facebook would launch such a service in March 2012.

Facebook has already taken over in markets like the U.S. and UK in terms of having the biggest share of revenues in online display ads, so it seems like a no-brainer that it would take that pole position into the mobile sphere. However, issues over privacy, and the basic lack of real estate on a mobile screen have been some of the gating factors in Facebook taking up the mobile marketing opportunity more aggressively.

When Carolyn Everson, Facebook’s global VP of marketing solutions, spoke at paidContent’s Advertising conference in September 2011, she highlighted Facebook’s caution in this mobile:

“We are holding ourselves to as high a standard as possible on mobile,” she said. “I don’t rule mobile out, but we are working hard to figure out what the right model is. We haven’t figured that out yet.”

As we noted at the time, check-in deals have been the one exception to that so far: when a user is in a location where Facebook can deliver a relevant offer, those deals are pushed to users. But if that has driven revenues to Facebook, it was not enough to merit a mention in the S-1 form.

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Briefing Media, a budding B2B start-up founded by former Incisive and Nexus executives, is buying the assets, including Farmers Guardian and Pulse, for £10 million, funded by the GCP private equity fund.

• Medical division (London): 33 staff, Pulse, Practical Commissioning, websites, the NAPC conference and the Mental Health Forum.
• Agriculture division (Preston): 57 staff, Farmers Guardian, Dairy Farmer, websites.

The two divisions made £12.1 million in 2011 revenue, UBM said, without disclosing their profitability or otherwise.

In a number of verticals, Briefing Media has ambitions to aggregate online stories from around the web using an automated semantic publishing platform, topped by a few analytical articles of its own. So far, it operates in one vertical, with a rough ‘n ready-looking site about B2B media themselves, and is operating its own conferences and the new British Media Awards.

Briefing Media regards the acquisitions as “a new chapter” for it, but it’s one UBM is glad to be shutting the book on. Together with the recent sales of its French medical publishing business, its UK titles for the pub industry and others, it has now off-loaded much of its classic B2B portfolio for £25 million since January 2011, leaving it focused on data-driven products, large conferences and marketing support services.

Briefing Media’s Rory Brown: “We see great opportunity in specialist business media markets but recognise that our world is evolving & we need to adapt with it.”

Briefing Media’s Neil Thackray: “This acquisition gives us both the scale and market opportunity to accelerate that ambition ... This will be the first but not the last acquisition we plan to make.”

For as long as Facebook has been running its Facebook Credits program—the virtual currency that users can redeem on games and other content peddled through Facebook’s network—it has been letting users top up those Credits using their mobile phones. It does this in partnership with companies like (reportedly) Boku and (definitely) Zong, the payments company bought by eBay’s PayPal last year. Users can also top up their Credits via PayPal and credit cards.

It’s not known how much, exactly, is purchased via the mobile channel today, but it is an example of how mobile is actually already driving significant revenue for Facebook. “Facebook Credits make a lot of money through mobile phones,” enough that Zong was “growing very fast last year” because of Facebook purchases, according to Frederic Court, a partner with Advent Venture Parnters, one of the VCs that backed Zong before the eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) buy.

This is because while sometimes the mobile payments were actually more expensive than a PayPal or credit card transaction, they are often a lot quicker to do, especially if you are in the middle of a game. And, as with other mobile-based payment options, they appeal to those who don’t have or want to enter card details.

Commissions on those Credits netted Facebook $557 million in revenues in 2011. (Facebook writes in the S-1 that the “other fees” that it designates on the same line as Payments was “immaterial.”)

At this point, Facebook doesn’t take any commission on Credits that are purchased via mobile: that service—which uses the premium SMS channel to send a code to a user to redeem Credits on the main site, and then charges the amount directly to the user’s mobile bill—already has some other parties taking a cut, including the provider (eg Zong or Boku), the mobile carrier and even another processing middleman. Rather, Facebook’s cut comes in the form of a commission on the payments, similar to what Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) takes for transactions on its App Store. That fee is 30 percent.

Could Facebook eventually take more control of its payments, and potentially cut out some of those middle people? Probably not soon, in Court’s opinion. “Zong brought something to Facebook that it didn’t know how to do, and it became very deeply integrated,” he said. “I don’t see them starting to do what Zong does, which is connecting hundreds of operators.” Then again, he added, “When they have a worth of $100 billion with $10 billion on the balance sheet they can do pretty much anything they want.”

What’s interesting is that as Facebook starts to expand some of the other functionality on its mobile platform, that will also open up a lot more opportunities in terms of mobile transactions as well.

As Facebook enables and opens APIs to get publishers to build apps for its mobile platforms (via the web and apps), “Facebook will make sure those are monetized,” he said. “I have no doubt Facebook will be making money on mobile games and other content given the engagement and scale on mobile. There is an amazing opening there.” Paying for Credits that will actually get used on the device itself, he said, will be “even more natural.”

Facebook in the S-1 said it had 425 million monthly active users accessing the social network via mobile devices, with that number outpacing the growth of overall subscribers.

“Credits is a wallet that you can top up in all kinds of ways,” he said. “Facebook has created its own currency and has imposed that on anyone offering digital goods on Facebook.” If anything, that currency might have a life outside the platform, to to buy things outside of Facebook.

But even with the opportunity for Credits, Court doesn’t see this eventually overtaking revenues from whatever advertising Facebook plans to put on its mobile services “for a very simple reason,” which is down to how those games are played today. “If you look at Zynga, only between two and three percent of people who play actually pay. The rest play for free. Tt will be the same for Facebook on mobile, with only a fraction spending money,” he predicted. “With advertising, 100 percent of the population is exposed.”

Even though Facebook has listed “no mobile ads” as one of its risks on the S-1, it could be playing its cards very close to its chest: the last few days has been a lot of speculation already about how soon Facebook will launch those mobile ads.

Razorfish (via Digiday) says that it is already working on a pilot for rich-media ads for the social network.

The blog Inside Facebook, meanwhile, has put its money down on sponsored stories to be the “most likely” first stab at mobile advertising on the site, with running a mobile ad network the second-most likely option. (That’s one that we explored a bit yesterday as well.)

Update: Razorfish’s VP of mobile, Paul Gelb, has made a correction on how his comments were portrayed in the Digiday story (via Twitter): his agency is not working on any mobile ad buying with Facebook. “In the interview I was referring to rich media featured stories, not paid ads,” he said.

A Facebook spokesperson, via email, added the following: “We want to clarify that we are not working with any agency to create paid ads on our mobile platform.”

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Now, with its relaunch on YouView still delayed, BT is taking it upon itself to relaunch the service’s platform.

BT will replace Vision boxes’ underlying architecture, based on Microsoft’s Mediaroom IPTV platform, over the internet with a lighter, Linux-based alternative, Faultline reports. The new system will include a new recommendation engine from Peter Gabriel-backed The Filter.

Overhauling BT Vision in its current format does not mean BT is out of YouView, the UK IPTV JV of which it is a stakeholder, but which has been poorly delayed. BT CEO Ian Livingstone told City analysts on Friday “middle of the year” remains the current anticipated launch date for YouView.

The service gained a license for Miramax movies this week.

September-to-December 2011 BT profits jumped 48 percent from the previous year after cost cuts despite revenue slipping five percent on fewer telephone calls.

BT’s Infinity fibre-to-the-cabinet customer base grew 95,000 to 400,000.

Release | Slides | Webcast

Axel Springer, which publishes Bild and is led by CEO Mathias Döpfner, says it has made a “minor investment” in the site.

But it is also becoming a “strategic marketing partner”. It is pledging space for Airbnb’s listings in its web and newspaper properties. Its own Immonet real estate marketplace site has got an “exclusive” German partnership with Airbnb in Germany.

This appears to be one of those deals that is more about mutual working benefit than future returns.

But Axel Springer is prone to investments.

It may have had to stump up considerably for Airbnb nevertheless - last summer’s $112 million investment in Airbnb by Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global and General Catalyst reportedly valued the company at $1.3 billion.

But much of the value of the deal may be coming from Axel Springer pegging a monetary value against exposure it is committing the site, rather than straight VC money.

Flaregames of Karlsruhe, Germany, is taking €6 million, led by Angry Bird backer Accel, to “scale” the company, hire new talent and to to market its upcoming series of free-to-play mobile games.

“Our first focus is on getting fun, high-quality games to market, and reaching the mass-market as well as mid-core gamers with our line-up this year,” said founder Klaas Kersting (via release).

“The mobile games business will likely be larger than the social games business,” according to Accel partner Harry Nelis. The firm is planning five games by year’s end.

Separately, Tusjuegos, a Spanish portal for buying and downloading PC and Mac games, is taking €420,000 from Spain’s VentureCap and others, Loogic reports.

Spain is plagued by illegal downloading. Tusjuegos is aiming to ensure game buying, after the box era subsides, remains legal in the online downloading arena.

Jaime Ferrer has been installed as CEO of Tusjuegos parent ITnet.

Q3 net income swung from last year’s 72.3 billion yen profit to a 159 billion yen ($2 billion) loss, as sales dipped 17.4 percent. All divisions brought in fewer sales than the previous year.

Sony (NYSE: SNE) blamed the worsening global economy plus localised issues like Thai floods and the aftershocks in Japan’s post-tsunami economy…

What connected TV boom?
TV sales led the company’s declines, with revenue down 42.9 percent. But that’s partly because a Japanese government TV subsidy scheme had ended.

Games is Sony’s most resilient division - down only 9.7 percent.
But Sony said the business contributed to its overall losses because of the cost of re-promoting its previously hacked PlayStation Network and cutting PlayStation 3 price to head off Xbox.

Music can’t live on big stars
Sony Music Entertainment sales dipped 11.7 percent despite two big Adele releases.

Sony Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) is struggling against competition
Sales fell 15.7 percent because feature phone owners are moving to rivals’ smartphones. For the 2011/12 full year, sales are now forecast to be five billion yen (€50 million) below November’s forecast.

“As challenging as times are for Sony now, were it not for the strong leadership of Sir Howard Stringer these past seven years, we would have been in a much more difficult position,” Hirai said on his appointment.

“The path we must take is clear: to drive the growth of our core electronics businesses - primarily digital imaging, smart mobile and game; to turn around the television business; and to accelerate the innovation that enables us to create new business domains.”

“Our advertisers typically do not have long-term advertising commitments with us,” Facebook’s S-1 warned. “Many of our advertisers spend only a relatively small portion of their overall advertising budget with us.

“In addition, advertisers may view some of our products, such as sponsored stories and ads with social context, as experimental and unproven.

“Advertising on the social web is a significant market opportunity that is still emerging and evolving. We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage reach, relevance, social context, and engagement offered by Facebook.”

Facebook manages to target standard display advertising very well because it knows so much about users, but the biggest opportunity may yet lay in getting users to participate in and distribute to their friends ad campaigns that are part of their social experience may yet hold greater promise. It is a long way from there, however.

Forrester analyst Nate Elliott cautions (via Reuters): “I worry that the billions of dollars of revenue that they generated last year aren’t as solid as they need to be because the advertisers who spent the money aren’t as thrilled with the results they got for it.”

Amongst advertising’s biggest skeptics is advertising’s biggest beast. WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell thinks advertisers will be challenged to reach social network users without offending them, making Facebook a better PR and word-of-mouth medium than a straight advertising one.

Indeed, Facebook has been trying to strike that very balance. But, with its quest to roll out the perfect formats still ongoing, Facebook has made frequent missteps along the way, such as its Beacon system, which proposed sharing users’ web purchases to friends before it was aborted.

Today, less than half a percent of people who Like big brands’ Facebook Pages actually bother to engage with them, according to new research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute.

Social is not Facebook’s only advertising play. Its offering today is focused mainly around display ads that run alongside users’ feeds. Here, Facebook is so big that, in some key markets like the U.S. and UK, it’s actually the biggest player of all in display advertising - social or otherwise - leaving those that effectively created the display field—Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), AOL (NYSE: AOL) and others—in the dust.

But it’s social advertising where perhaps the greatest potential lays. And frankly Facebook, like its advertisers, has not yet cracked the nut; that mission goes on.

If, previously, upgrades like Beacon, Timeline and its perpetual redesigns have prompted user outcry, expect future responses to manifest as share price fluctuation when such revisions take place in the public glare of Wall Street.

Still, users’ redesign shock often subsides, stock price can rebound accordingly. And, if Facebook can execute fully on the social advertising holy grail, it can become spectacularly successful.

None of this looks very problematic today. In 2011, Facebook advertising revenue rose 69 percent because it showed 42 percent more advertising thanks to a growing user base; it scored an 18 percent higher price per ad.

But Facebook concedes these growth rates may not be sustainable. “Our user growth has been a primary driver of growth in our revenue,” its S-1 says. “But “our rates of user and revenue growth will decline over time”, especially in the west.

One Facebook ad buying agency thinks that slowdown could be a good thing…

“The market has now entered a phase where there is no longer any super-growth in user numbers to dilute the increases in cost caused by demand increases,” Alchemy Social managing director Will Ashton writes in a new white paper. “As such, we expect costs to increase at rates substantially higher than those we have seen previously.”

In other words, advertisers rushing to Facebook are driving up demand, but the slowdown in Facebook user growth suggests finite supply, driving up the rates it can charge.

Outside the west, Facebook has a huge opportunity in mobile, having gathered 425 million users. But it’s not monetising a single one because it is not selling any ads through mobile. Worse - until then, mobile success could actually hurt the company from within…

“Growth in use of Facebook through our mobile products, where we do not currently display ads, as a substitute for use on personal computers may negatively affect our revenue and financial results,” the company warns. “Our ability to (generate mobile revenue) successfully is unproven.”

$3.1 billion in 2011 ad revenue suggests Facebook is well on its way. What an amazing number for such a young paradigm. But some investors may question whether much of that was short-term experimentation by advertisers, meaning Facebook must work hard to prove its value to them as much as they have to itself.

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»  Is Facebook’s IPO the start of something, or the end? (GigaOm)

»  Zuckerberg claims “We don’t build services to make money” (Forbes)

»  IPO filing says that Zynga accounted for 12% of Facebook’s revenue in 2011 (TNW)

»  From founders to decorators, Facebook riches (NYT)

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845 million active users, 100 billion “friendships”, 250 million photos uploaded daily

That works out to an average of 118.3 friends per user, and an average of 3.4 0.3 pictures uploaded each day by those active users. Among those 845 million active users, more than half—483 million—are actually daily active users (taking the photo average up to 0.5 uploads per day, or around 15 per month). They’ve gone up by 48 percent since December 2010, when they stood at 327 million DAUs. Those numbers sound big on one hand, but not so big on another: doing some very basic math, this works out to average revenues per user of only $4.39. As a point of comparison, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) currently makes about $36 per user; Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) $16 per user (via CBS).

$1 billion in net income on revenues of $3.711 billion

That works out to net income at about 30 percent of revenues in 2011, up slightly from the previous two years when net income was at about 29 percent of revenues. A sign of improving efficiencies?

$3.2 billion in ad revenue

That’s the ad revenue figure for 2011, out of total revenues of $3.7 billion. The rest of its revenue is made up by Facebook Credits and other payments. The growth in ad revenues at the moment appears to be slowing down: Facebook says between 2009 and 2010, ad revenues grew by 145 percent, but then between 2010 and 2011 it grew by only 69 percent. There’s a clear sign that Facebook will need to further diversify how it makes its money if that trend continues. Credits and other fees are still very much on the rise and becoming a more prominent part of the overall revenue pie. In 2011 they amounted to 15 percent of revenues ($557 million); in 2010 they accounted for only five percent ($106 million).

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$0 in mobile advertising

Facebook currently makes nothing from advertising on mobile devices because it has yet to extend ads to its mobile platforms. The S-1 didn’t specify whether it planned to introduce this and in fact cast its mobile prospects in the most sober light possible: Facebook thinks that growth in mobile monthly active users will exceed the growth of overall MAUs “for the foreseeable future” as Facebook continues to encourage more mobile use of its platform. There must be a business agenda in that but Facebook doesn’t spell it out here. In fact, it cautions that as more people could just start using the mobile platforms more than the desktop version, where ads do appear, “if we are unable to successfully implement monetization strategies for our mobile users, our revenue and financial results may be negatively affected.”

Zuck’s salary is going down to $1 from next year. At the moment Facebook has 3,200 employees in total. That works out to an average revenue per employee of $1,159,687.50.

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There’s no firm idea yet on what that $5 billion might mean for a valuation of the company. But here are some quick early numbers: Facebook made $3.71 billion in revenue in 2011, almost twice what it did in 2010. Of that $3.71 billion, $1 billion was net income.

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It has 845 million active registered users with 483 million of them termed “daily active users”.

Advertising accounted for 85 percent of its revenue last year. Zynga accounted for 12 percent of its revenues overall and over 80 percent of its payment revenues.

And to confirm the rumors we heard about which banks are involved: Morgan Stanley is leading the IPO filing with J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs, BofA Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital, and Allen & Co also participating.

Several folks are in line for a big gain on their investments. Facebook listed Accel Partners, DST Global Limited, Goldman Sachs, and T. Rowe Price as its major institutional shareholders. Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder and CEO of startup Asana, is also a major stockholder listed in Facebook’s statement. Notable among the individual investors is Peter Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and will serve on Facebook’s board of directors.

It’s not just the IPO price, bankers and valuation that had people busy guessing. People have been speculating about other aspects of this IPO, including how much of a fee the banks will get on the deal (the range we’ve seen: between one percent and seven percent).

Now, with the IPO finally out, people will begin to pore over the numbers to figure out all sorts of things about Facebook that have not been completely clear while it was still in startup mode: What are its margins? What does it expect its growth rate to be? What are the comparative sizes of different business areas like advertising versus Facebook credits? What’s the geographical spread of its business?

However you cut it, the company has been a ground-breaker in the online world. You can argue about whether or not Facebook introduced the concept of social networking, but it has certainly run away with it, and now has 845 million users. And counting.

The question today is whether it will be able to convert that into a sustainable financial juggernaut, too?

More S-1 detail and number crunching here.

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UK-based Synchronica’s main suitor is the Switzerland-based Myriad Group, which develops mobile software services that it says have been loaded into some 2.5 billion devices, including every Android device.

In a market announcement from Myriad, it outlines the main reasons why it believes Synchronica needs to sell itself:

Essentially, Synchronica owes Nokia $20.2 million by December 31, 2015. However, “the Myriad Board does not believe that Synchronica, given its current financial position and future prospects, will be able to repay the Nokia Debt and would also question Synchronica’s ability to meet the current repayment schedule in the short term.”

Myriad says it has had confirmation from Nokia that were Synchronica to be sold, the buyer would not need to pay the outstanding debt immediately.

A Synchronica spokesperson, meanwhile, would not confirm whether Myriad’s assertion over the inability to make Nokia payments was true or not.

Earlier this month, Synchronica issued a statement that said it expects to report full year 2011 revenues of approximately $23 million, “marginally ahead of market expectations”, and an increase of 111 percent compared to 2010. However it also posted increasing losses over the course of last year.

Synchronica purchase of Nokia’s messaging gateway business in June 2011 promised a big step up for business. It’s not clear, however, whether that messaging business was actually profitable to run when it was bought by Synchronica—and if Myriad’s assertions are true, Synchronica may not have been able to make a go of it in any case.

Before the Nokia buy, Synchronica focused on messaging services for emerging and developing markets. The Nokia deal, at the time worth more than the market value of Synchronica itself, gave the company entry to more mature mobile markets: it included the transfer of 10 carrier customers—including AT&T (NYSE: T), Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint (NYSE: S)—which used Nokia’s technology in their own-branded messaging and email services, covering some six million users. The revenues from those deals were never disclosed by Synchronica but they worked on a per-user, per-month basis and were recurring.

The original deal also included a payment from Nokia to preload those messaging services into its own devices for a further 18 months, worth $18.2 million; a long-term relationship for further development of the messaging gateway and client software; the transfer of 250 employees; and 10 patents with royalty-free licensing for a further eight still owned by Nokia.

Myriad is offering £20.63 million ($32.5 million) for Synchronia, or 13 pence per share, according to the statement. This is the second time that Myriad has made an offer for Synchronia; the first, back in November, was rejected by Synchronica’s board, and the two sides have been negotiating since then. Today’s offer represents a premium of 70.49 percent on the company’s trading price on November 10, the day before Myriad’s first offer.

Myriad, which itself has a market capitalization of approximately 197.05 million Swiss francs ($214 million), develops linux-based and java-based software solutions—for example a piece of software that unifies all a users’ contacts from different social networks into a single screen—as well as services for other consumer electronics devices such as connected TVs.

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