Facebook Hits 4 Billion Daily Video Views

On the video front, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on the company's earnings call that Facebook in Q1 served an average of 4 billion video views per day. The social giant averaged 3 billion daily video views at the end of 2014. About 75% of video views occur on mobile devices, the company said.

The company posted revenue of $3.54 billion, up 42% year-over-year (and up 49% excluding foreign-exchange rates). Net income for Q1 2015 was $512 million, down 20% compared with $642 million on higher spending; excluding certain items Facebook said profits were up 28% versus a year earlier and earnings per share were 42 cents. Wall Street analysts expected the company to post revenue of $3.56 billion with earnings of 40 cents per share, according to Thomson Reuters.

Mobile ads were 73% of Facebook's advertising revenue the quarter, or about $2.42 billion. In the year-ago quarter, mobile advertising was 59% of ad revenue, or about $1.34 billion.

"This was a strong start to the year. We continue to focus on serving our community and connecting the world," Zuckerberg said in announcing the first-quarter results.

Facebook's mobile user base again grew faster than its total users. Mobile daily active users were 798 million on average for March 2015, an increase of 31% year-over-year, while mobile monthly active users were 1.25 billion as of March 31, 2015, up 24%. Overall, Facebook had 1.44 billion global monthly active users at the end of the period, up 13% from Q1 2014.

Earlier Wednesday, Facebook launched a test of Hello, an Android app built by the company's Messenger team that pulls up info from Facebook about incoming callers and lets users search for people or businesses on the social service and place calls. In addition, the company's WhatsApp messaging service this week began rolling out voice-calling features for iOS devices.