Facebook Hits $3 Billion in Quarterly Revenue for the First Time But Plans Bigger Spending

Facebook’s Q3 earnings beat Wall Street estimates once again on Tuesday.

Facebook posted earnings of $0.43 per share on $3.2 billion in revenue for Q3. Wall Street estimates hovered between $0.38 and $0.40 per share on roughly $3.1 billion in revenue. Facebook also reported steady user growth, now totaling 1.35 billion monthly active users, up from 1.19 billion at this time last year. That’s roughly 13 percent growth from the same quarter last year, on par with the year-over-year growth expectations from RBC analyst Mark Mahaney.

That number includes 864 million people worldwide who visit Facebook daily, up from 728 million in Q3 2013.

Facebook revenues continue to grow thanks in large part to the social network’s mobile success over the past few years. More than 1.1 billion people now visit Facebook on a mobile device each month, and that’s where the bulk of Facebook’s ad revenue comes from. Mobile advertising — which Facebook only introduced about two years ago — now makes up 66 percent of the company’s total ad sales, up nearly 35 percent in the past year.

Update: Facebook stock dipped more than 10 percent during the company’s hour-long earnings call with investors.

The decline shortly followed CFO David Wehner’s comments the company expects to accelerate its spending next year by 50 to 70 percent, cutting deeply into profits. Zuckerberg has taken bets on big acquisitions in the past year or so and it looks like he’ll be continuing that strategy going forward.

He downplayed the idea that Facebook may get into mobile payments following reports earlier this month that Facebook may be building a payments tool into its Messenger app. Zuckerberg said that ads represent a more efficient business vertical than payments, and Facebook instead plans to partner with payments companies like PayPal down the road.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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