Driven by ads on mobile videos and its photo-sharing app Instagram, Facebook’s first-quarter earnings surged past expectations today, boosting shares in after-hours trading by as much as 9 percent.

Facebook said it earned a profit of 2.2 billion, or 77 cents a share before certain costs such as stock compensation. That was up 87 percent from a year ago. Revenues rose 52 percent, to $5.38 billion. Analysts had forecast revenues of $5.25 billion, with a profit of 62 cents a share.

Facebook also said mobile advertising revenues grew by 75 percent, to comprise 82 percent of overall ad revenues, up from 73 percent a year ago, driven by video. “We are at the beginning of a golden age for video,” founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg (pictured), said during the earnings conference call.

Although Alphabet Inc., parent company of No. 1 online ad seller Google Inc., last week reported first-quarter earnings that disappointed investors, both the search giant and Facebook continue to cement their dual dominance of the $60 billion online advertising market. They also continue to funnel big money into building out their data centers, collecting massive amounts of data for ad targeting and analysis, and advancing artificial intelligence software.

Facebook reported its total costs and expenses rose 29 percent from a year ago, to $3.37 billion–not nearly as fast as the revenue rise. But capital spending was $1.13 billion, more than double a year ago. That’s considerably more than revenue growth, an indication of the price to stay ahead of rivals.

And it won’t be getting cheaper to maintain the lead. Chief Financial Officer David Wehner said he expects the $4 billion to $4.5 billion in capital spending that Facebook earlier forecasted will likely reach the high end of that range this year. Nonetheless, Facebook can afford it. It also produced more than $3 billion in operating cash flow during the quarter.

Matched only by Google, Facebook’s technical infrastructure continued to help drive the company’s customary earnings outperformance. It appears that Facebook’s virtuous cycle of increasing interest by advertisers in its ad offerings, which funds further technology investments to spur more improvements in ad offerings, remained strong.

Facebook has been driving for the past couple of years to get brand advertising dollars still mostly spent on television to move over to its website and mobile app. Although much of Facebook’s revenue surge has appeared to come from other websites and apps more than from TV, some marketers are starting to look at Facebook as a branding vehicle.

At its recent F8 conference for developers and business partners, the company focused on live video and on its messaging app as prime places to reach its 1.65 billion monthly users in new ways.

For one, Facebook’s Instagram photo- and video-sharing app has started to attract big ad bucks. eMarketer predicts it will gross $1.53 billion in worldwide revenues this year. And ad agency 3Q Digital said it has seen a big shift in spending toward Instagram in the first quarter, with advertisers paying at least as much as they do for ads in Facebook’s news feed. Instagram’s surge prompted investment bank Oppenheimer & Co. Inc. today to boost its estimates for Facebook.

On the video front, Facebook recently has made a concerted push to get more live video on its news feed to win back viewers’ waning attention. It’s reported to be paying media companies such as BuzzFeed and Vox about $250,000 for 20 live videos a month over a three-month period.

Video ads taking off

But already, video ads are taking off. They comprised 29 percent of all ad impressions in the first quarter, according to app analytics company Sensor Tower.

Video at Facebook’s scale also takes a lot of technical infrastructure to do well. “Given Facebook’s investment into video, they must be making pretty big investments in storage and computing engines to recode and distribute video,” said Patrick Moorhead, president and principal analyst at Austin-based consultancy Moor Insights & Strategy.

Although Wehner said surging growth last year will make it tougher for Facebook to show quite this quarter’s pace of growth later this year, investors appear confident that Facebook has more room to run.

“Facebook appears set to capture 47% of global digital advertising growth outside of China during 2016,” Brian Wieser, an analyst with Pivotal Research Group, wrote in a note to clients today. “All of this has occurred before many of Facebook’s emerging products (such as Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, Oculus or the Facebook Audience Network) have fully started to scale, providing optimism for the company’s capacity to produce ongoing revenue growth.”

Indeed, some marketers think Facebook is well on the way to becoming an even bigger force for businesses to connect with consumers. “Facebook has been smart moving from being a destination to being a backbone,” said Rye Clifton, director of experience at the ad agency GSD&M. “You’re sharing your information across everywhere. It’s really useful for businesses.”

Facebook also announced a proposal to add a new class of non-voting shares to give Zuckerberg more control over the future of the company. The arrangement would allow Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan to fulfill a promise to sell 99 percent of their Facebook shares for philanthropic purposes such as curing all disease without losing control of the company.  The proposal, reminiscent of Google’s stock structure, must be approved by shareholders.

Zuckerberg said that for all the bold bets such as buying Instagram and Oculus, he expects to make even more in the future, some of them on broader initiatives involving bringing people together.