eBay has released its first-quarter earnings report, and there’s good news for the company’s fans: it beat most analysts’ estimates.  The bad news for fans (and especially shareholders) is that eBay’s stock has nonetheless fallen 8.14 percent in after-hours trading, possibly due to a weak forecast.

In fairness to eBay, Google and Yahoo suffered similar fates after making positive Q1 reports of their own.  Also, eBay’s forecasts weren’t awful; the company just expects revenue for all of 2010 to fall in the $8.80 billion to $9.10 billion range, whereas experts would like to see $9.12 billion.

So let’s move on to the success stories.  eBay reported $2.20 billion in revenue, which is a little bit better than the anticipated $2.19 billion, and it beat earnings per share estimates by a similar margin (reporting $0.42 versus $0.41).

The company recorded a year-over-year increase in total payment volume of 35 percent, too, even though a gain of just 33 percent was predicted.

CEO and President John Donahoe observed as a result, "Our first quarter results reflect another strong step toward achieving our three-year growth and profitability goals."

eBay now simply needs to work on repeating that step a few more times for the sake of not losing too many investors.