The Ascent is The Motley Fool's new personal finance brand devoted to helping you live a richer life. I mean I can talk to it briefly and then you can add to it if you think that there is more. Great. Dave, I don't know if you want to say anything about the second point. Operating income was $5.9 billion representing a 33% operating margin and our tax rate was 16%. And we're building specialized products, we never would have thought of before. Don't have a Benzinga account? On the first, I think we've been really focused. The moves by platforms that make third-party targeting and measurement more difficult, and then our own moves on launching privacy controls. I mean for commerce on WhatsApp more broadly, we're very focused on making it, so that small businesses can have a presence on all of the apps, right, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger and can communicate organically with people and then increasingly can do things that can help them drive transactions. We are doubling the size of WhatsApp video calls from four to eight. And with that, here is, Sheryl to talk more about our business. Sheryl Sandberg -- Chief Operating Officer. In March, we estimate that on average 2.3 billion people used at least one of our services on a daily basis and that approximately 3 billion people were active on a monthly basis. That means measuring the value of their advertising is more important than ever, which is something our personalized ads provide. Sure, Colin, I can take both of those. Mark Mahaney -- RBC Capital Markets -- Analyst. It's gratifying that people are using our family of apps to stay informed and connect with people and organizations that they care about. So we're working on a lot of work streams there. But I'm not sure what will happen there long-term? As always, I am grateful to everyone on this journey with us and that's especially true during this period. If you have any questions feel free to call us at 1-877-440-ZING or email us at vipaccounts@benzinga.com. In terms of expenses, we are continuing to monitor the COVID-19 situation and its impact on our business and operations and we'll adjust to our plans accordingly. I think that we'll see a meaningful economic hit if I had to predict for the period of the health emergency. And then second, just given the increased engagement with communication tools and voice and video in particular, how is that translating into increased activity in the feed and within stories? So this is work that we're uniquely positioned to do, because Facebook is a global community and people use their authentic identities on our service. Turning now to the financials. We're continuing to focus on recruiting on the tax side. And I'm proud of how we've supported people around the world during this time. So we're seeing savings there and we're going to be looking at getting marketing efficiencies, because obviously prices are coming down on the marketing front, so that we can get the same impact for less dollars and also look for efficiencies on marketing spend. I want to close by saying how grateful I am to our partners and teams around the world. We're not concentrated. Right. Eric, on the bad debt expense that increased by $193 million. Read or listen to the conference call. In addition, we have committed over $300 million to date in investments to help our broader community during this crisis, which will have an impact on our financial performance this year. Justin Post -- Bank of America Merrill Lynch -- Analyst. So how do you think about balancing levels of investment with revenue over the long-term. The April trends reflect weakness across all of our user geographies, as most of our major countries have had some sort of shelter-in-place guidelines in effect. In late March, we announced a $100 million investment to support the news industry, with $25 million in grant funding for local news organizations and $75 million in marketing spend to get money to publishers. Hope everyone is safe. I mean we're going to a lot more to share on this soon. SMBs are also a major part of our business going forward. Great, thanks. Market data powered by FactSet and Web Financial Group. Youssef Squali -- SunTrust Robinson Humphrey -- Analyst. I wish we can make more of them faster during this period. Let's conquer your financial goals together...faster. Now beyond our immediate plans to help respond to the pandemic. In the current environment these investments are paying off. During this call, we may present both GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. And Dave will share more on our financial outlook in a few minutes. Revenue was strong from the beginning of the quarter through the first week of March, when we began to see a steep slowdown in our ads business, particularly in countries that implemented shelter-in-place measures to reduce the spread of the virus. Fundraisers have been available to support non-profits and people since 2015, but given the overwhelming interest in helping small businesses, weather the storm, we made these tools available for businesses as well, something we never expected to do. We are also mindful of the challenges many businesses are facing in this crisis, including the 140 million small businesses who use our platform. We are understandably cautious given that most economists are forecasting a global GDP contraction in Q2, which if history where a guide, would suggest that the potential for an even more severe advertising industry contraction. Finally, excluding the FTC expense from Q1 of 2019, G&A grew 49%, driven partially by an increase in estimated credit losses related to COVID-19. Finally, we hope that everyone listening today is staying safe. So some of the functions related to things like advertising sales is slower in those departments, given the overall economic climate. Mark at the very beginning, you talked about the economic fallout possibly lasting longer than people think. It's a public health emergency, a global economic crisis and a time of great anxiety and personal tragedy for so many. Mark do you want to take the e-commerce or you want me to do both. Learn when companies announce their quarterly and annual earnings, along with the latest EPS estimates and conference call times from Yahoo Finance. There are few contributing factors here. That's was our core product and innovation efforts. And secondly, can you give us any color on percent of ads that come from direct response versus brand or maybe CPC bidding versus CPM? On the latter point alone, since the WHO declared COVID-19 as a pandemic, we have seen in the US dollar appreciate 5% relative to the foreign currencies we do business in. So it's difficult to extrapolate performance based on a small sample of data. This inexplicit reference to Facebook was first noticed by CNBC. Just a follow-up to the last question. And we put this COVID-19 Information Center at the top of everyone's Facebook app, and so far we've directed more than 2 billion people to it. So it really wasn't limited to video and messaging, it was broad-based as Mark said, and that's creating supply on the ad impression side as well. But this economic pullback has certainly reinforced for me the importance of maintaining high margins. One aspect of online commerce that I want to mention is the partnership that we just announced with Jio platforms in India. Daily active users reached 1.73 billion, up 11% compared to last year. Making sure that our services are stable and reliable during this period is a top priority. Before we get started, I also just want to say that I know this is a very hard time for a lot of people. So there is certainly a range of outcomes that I don't think I have any particular insight that that's not public or that you don't have. And Dave, I think you mentioned, large and small advertisers were kind of pulling back in March and into April at about the same rate, but any more pronounced desal from large versus small. All right. Our total ad revenue for Q1 was $17.4 billion, which is a 17% year-over-year increase. Turning now to expenses. Given the strong engagement growth and related demands on our infrastructure, this year's capex reduction should be viewed as a deferral into 2021 rather than savings. Our financial position has allowed us to continue investing in building products and making investments like our partnership with Jio, even when the underlying economic conditions are challenging. Your next question comes from the line of Doug Anmuth from JP Morgan. And we plan to lead and offer the best services for social uses in each of those different categories. And then understanding you're not giving guidance, but talk to us about some of the key verticals that would be needed to sort of bring the business back to growth as we go throughout the year? Stay safe everybody and we look forward to speaking with you again. Overall, though, our business, depends on the success of small businesses.

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