No one will ever call Facebook a payments company.

The social media giant today posted its third quarter earnings, and its payments results were weak. The company generated $246 million of payments revenue last quarter, up from $234 million last quarter and $218 million in the third quarter of 2013.

But don’t just focus on the year-over-year growth rate of total payments revenue. The real story is in Facebook’s payments revenue per user, and that amount last quarter stayed flat at $0.18 per user, compared to total revenue per user, which grew 7.1% last quarter compared to the previous quarter. In fact, on a year-over-year basis Facebook’s payments revenue per user fell 5% in 3Q — as it fell 5% in the second quarter and dropped 5% in the first quarter of 2014. This is not a good trend line, folks.

The very first question faced by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, during yesterday’s earnings call related to payments, and Zuckerberg effectively dismissed the growth potential in Facebook’s payments business, saying only that “it’s very important for all online businesses and our customers and partners that there is a good online payment system … that is smooth.” Rather, Zuckerberg is placing the company’s revenue bet on advertising, not payments.

We view the ads part of the business as a more efficient part of the businesses than payments itself. Payments tends to be fixed fee whereas and ad, because of the option model, there is really good price discrimination built in. So a partner or business who is willing to pay us 30% of their revenue can bid that and some of these willing to only pay 5% of the revenue can bid that and the auction model inherently takes care of that.

So we think that focusing on the ads part is going end up being the more effective thing for us to do but we realize that it’s important for the ad system over time for and for all of our partners for there to be a payment system, which is why we’re excited about partnering with credit card companies and partnering with PayPal and all of the different folks doing online payments to make their solutions as good as possible as well.

We are sure this will be thrilling news for David Marcus, et al.