Facebook's ad sales machine roars

SAN FRANCISCO — Facebook said it's closing in on 2 billion users as it topped Wall Street estimates for first-quarter revenue, sending a strong signal that marketers are continuing to plunk down more ad dollars despite growing concerns over the spread of fake news and violent, graphic videos on the platform.

Revenue soared 49% to $8.03 billion, easily coasting past analyst consensus of $7.83 billion.

"We had a good start to 2017," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement.

Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser said the first quarter was "stellar."

"The company’s ongoing expansion is substantial considering how big it already is," Wieser wrote in a research note.

Facebook reported net income of $3.06 billion, or $1.04 a share, up from $1.73 billion, or 60 cents a share, a year ago. Facebook no longer reports earnings on an adjusted basis, meaning stock-based compensation is included.

Facebook added 80 million users in the first quarter, giving the service a total of 1.94 billion who frequent it at least once a month and a big boost in its ambitions to soak up billions more users around the globe.

Two-thirds of Facebook's monthly active users visit Facebook every day, the company said. The number of people who visited Facebook every day was 1.28 billion, up 18% year over year.

Jan Dawson, chief analyst with Jackdaw Research, told USA TODAY in February that Facebook was on track to hit 2 billion users later this year, a major milestone that no other Internet company has reached.

"Massive user growth year on year, and amazingly it’s accelerating despite the massive existing scale," Dawson said at the time. "It’s on track to become the first 2 billion-user company later this year."

At this rate of growth, Facebook will surpass 2 billion users by late June, Dawson predicted Wednesday,

That kind of global growth should translate into growth in advertising sales for Facebook. But Facebook's plans to stop increasing the number of ads shown to users in their news feeds in mid-2017 has concerned investors, who are eager to hear how the company will make up for the slowdown in revenue growth.

Shares fell about 2.4% to $148.30 in after-hours trading following remarks from David Wehner reiterating that advertising revenue growth will continue to decline in 2017. Facebook announced first-quarter earnings after the market closed Wednesday.

"We continue to expect that our ad revenue growth rates will come down meaningfully over the course of 2017," Wehner said.

He also warned investors to expect rising expenses.

"As we look into 2017 and beyond there are going to be a number of initiatives we believe are valuable to the community and to the company in the long term but are going to be net negative on our operating margins," Wehner said.

Infrastructure costs are also expected balloon this year to support global expansion. Wehner said Facebook is embarking on a "significant ramp up" with capital expenditures in the range of $7 billion to $7.5 billion, up 50% from last year.

That could put pressure on Facebook to accelerate revenue, whether from video advertising or its other apps, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.

Compounding those concerns: Whether consumers will be turned off Facebook by fake news or the graphic content showing up in its Facebook Live streaming service.

"Much of  this slump was felt in the U.S. and Canada – Facebook’s largest market by revenue — where the company’s advertising revenues fell by $584 million quarter-over-quarter, by comparison to a drop of $232 million quarter-over-quarter a year ago," Ovum analyst Pamela Clark-Dickson said in an email. "Clearly the fake news furor, which hit its peak during the 2016 US Presidential election, has had an impact not only on consumers’ trust in Facebook, but has also rendered advertisers more cautious in their spend on the platform."

Facebook has taken steps to root out misleading articles on the service. Zuckerberg pledged earlier Wednesday to hire 3,000 additional content reviewers to more quickly remove inappropriate material.

Nevertheless, advertisers are worried that the issues will sour Facebook users on the service, said eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson.

"Advertisers really appreciate the results they get from advertising on Facebook. They are generally very happy. That's why they are spending so much money there," Williamson said. "So I think they are willing to give Facebook time to figure it out."

But, she said. "if things continue, if say consumers' moods turn noticeably darker or engagement falls off, I think advertisers would be concerned."