Facebook stock dropped a few bucks in Wednesday’s after-hours trading despite the company topping Wall Street’s earnings and revenue benchmarks for the first quarter of 2017.
Mark Zuckerberg’s company, which is now using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) accounting as opposed to the non-GAAP method most of corporate America prefers, reported earnings per share (EPS) of $1.04 on revenue of $8.032 billion. Media analysts predicted GAAP EPS of 87 cents, according to Thomson Reuters. A Yahoo Finance forecast saw revenue coming in at $7.83 billion.
Facebook’s profit rose 76 percent from the comparable quarter last year.
Facebook also reported 1.28 billion daily active users, which is up 18 percent year over year. And with a headcount now up to 18,770, the company said it has 38 percent more employees than it did last year.
“We had a good start to 2017,” commented Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “We’re continuing to build tools to support a strong global community.”
Facebook executives will host a conference call at 5 p.m. ET to discuss the quarter in greater detail.
Earlier today, the social media giant said it would hire 3,000 more people to review videos of crime and suicides following a series of tragic events that were broadcasted on Facebook Live. The company already has 4,500 people reviewing such events; in a blog post, Zuckerberg said he would increase the total to 7,500 staffers.
A murder in Cleveland and the killing of a baby in Thailand have recently made international news when they were shown live on the streaming service. These type of violent posts violate Facebook’s terms of service but they often go unnoticed until users report them directly to the company.
For the record: A previous version of this story was written based on forecasts from a Yahoo Finance analyst compilation, which uses non-GAAP accounting methods. This quarter, Facebook switched to GAAP principles. The company beat earnings expectations based on forecasts using that system.