Twitter's Userbase Increased
Twitter Inc on Tuesday posted quarterly revenue and an increase in monthly active users, showing its efforts to police spam accounts and abusive posts were helping attract more users and advertising dollars.
Twitter has been under pressure from lawmakers over privacy concerns and political influence activity on its service. Twitter’s clean-up has included removing thousands of spam and suspicious accounts, which it had blamed for sequential declines in monthly users in recent quarters.
Advertisers have welcomed those moves, but the company still faces a broader backlash against social media.
Twitter disclosed its monthly active user (MAU) count, but from now on the company will only provide its “monetizable” daily active users, created to measure people exposed to advertising on a daily basis.
The company also forecast revenue for the next quarter below analyst estimates, and said that it would need to continue to spend heavily on cleaning up Twitter as well as new ad products and other improvements.
The company’s quarterly MAU count rose 9 million to reach 330 million from the previous quarter.
Monetizable daily active users or mDAU rose to 134 million in the first quarter, up 12 percent from a year ago, Twitter said.
For the first quarter of 2019, Twitter’s revenue rose 18 percent from a year ago to $787 million.
Revenue was boosted by ad sales that also jumped 18 percent to $679 million. In the United States, ad revenue rose by 26 percent year-on-year, thanks in part to video ads.
The company expects revenue of between $770 million and $830 million.
Total operating expense including cost of revenue rose by 18 percent to $693 million from the first quarter a year ago.
Twitter reported quarterly profit of $191 million, compared with $61 million, a year earlier.