Facebook soars past Q1 estimates on revenue of $2.50B and 1.28B monthly active users

Facebook’s ad revenue hit $2.27 billion this quarter, and investors are very happy.

Facebook today reported its first quarter earnings for 2014, with earnings per share (EPS) of $0.34 on revenue of $2.50 billion. Analysts had expected EPS of $0.24 on revenue of 2.36 billion, so that’s a nice increase over expectations.

Facebook’s ad revenue is up 82 percent this quarter on a year-over-year basis. Meanwhile, the social network has hit 1.28 billion monthly active users, and 802 million daily active users.

Additionally, Facebook chief financial officer David Ebersman is stepping down from his role.

Facebook’s Q1 amounts to one of the social networking company’s busiest quarters ever. The acquisition of WhatsApp — or rather, its hefty $19 billion price tag — caught the tech scene by surprise, and Facebook’s subsequent move to buy a virtual reality company, Oculus, was nearly too forward-thinking for even the most generous of analysts.

Facebook’s long list of deals and experiments are beginning to mirror the ambitions of Google X in size and scope. The company already claims to have connected 3 million people in the Philippines and Paraguay to the Internet. Meanwhile, Facebook-owned Oculus could expand beyond games and into movies.

Since its peak of $69 per share in mid March, Facebook’s stock price has dropped under $62 per share. In normal trading, FB was down by approximately 1.4 percent. In after hours trading, since the earnings report came out, the company is up by nearly 3 percent.

Last quarter, Facebook “blew past Wall Street estimates” with $2.5 billion in revenue. For Facebook’s Q1 2013, the company reported revenue of $1.45 billion.

Media research firm eMarketer claims Facebook accounted for 5.8 percent of all global digital ad revenues last year. eMarketer expects Facebook’s share of  global digital ad revenues to grow to 7.8 percent by the end of 2014, stealing away marketshare from Google.