The Menlo Park company also announced that its longtime chief financial officer is stepping down to return to the health care industry. "Facebook earnings were good, they once again beat expectations, and that is now a firmly established pattern," said analyst Brian Blau of Gartner Research. The reason advertisers remain interested in Facebook is its vast global audience, which hit 1.28 billion monthly average users by the end of March, an increase of 34 percent compared with the previous first quarter. Neither deal has closed, but during a conference call with analysts, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook's immediate goal is to grow WhatsApp's membership to 1 billion people. Ebersman will remain with the company until September to help his successor, David Wehner, who joined Facebook in 2012 after leaving struggling San Francisco social games maker Zynga.