REUTERS/Stephen LamBritish actor Benedict Cumberbatch (L) and Mark Zuckerberg (R), founder and CEO of Facebook, speak on stage during the 2nd annual Breakthrough Prize Awards at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California November 9, 2014. Facebook's stock has traded as high as $81.88 today, marking an all-time high. The company's market cap is $227.7 billion, according to Yahoo Finance.
There's no real explanation for Facebook's stock to be flying to the moon. Investors are buying for whatever reason.
However, this is a fitting cap to 2014 for Facebook.
It's had an excellent year. It bought virtual reality company Oculus Rift for $2 billion, messaging app WhatsApp for $22 billion, it carved out Facebook messenger into a standalone app, and it launched a bunch of experimental apps.
Instagram, which it bought for $1 billion in 2012, is now valued at $35 billion by analysts at Citi. Instagram has 300 million users, making it bigger than Twitter as measured by users. Instagram has started to experiment with ads, and it looks like it could be the next major source of revenue growth.
Facebook's mobile revenue is on fire. It has pulled ahead and "now captures around three times as much revenue as Google from mobile graphical and video ads in markets like the U.S.," according to Amir Efrati at The Information.
Facebook has been doing well for a long time now, but this year it really hit a groove, and it looks poised to dominate for years to come. With the main Facebook app, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, Facebook has group of apps that it will be able to monetize for years to come.