/ AFP PHOTO / LOIC VENANCE
by Rob Lever
Agence France Presse
WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Twitter reported its second consecutive quarterly profit Wednesday in a positive sign for the short messaging service after years in the red.
The San Francisco-based social network earned $61 million in the first three months of the year, helped by strong growth in advertising revenue and modest gains in users.
First-quarter revenues rose 21 percent from a year ago to $665 million, and the key figure of monthly active users increased by six million from late last year to 336 million.
Shares in Twitter jumped 3.3 percent in pre-market trading on the better-than-expected earnings.
Twitter stock has nearly doubled from a year ago, when concerns were high over the future of the service.
Chief executive Jack Dorsey said the recent changes made to the service have helped “engagement,” a measure of how often people turn to the social network and how long they stay.
“We grew our audience and engagement… and continued our work to make it easier to follow topics, interests, and events on Twitter,” Dorsey said in the earnings release.
“We also introduced a new framework to think more cohesively about the issues affecting our service, including information quality and safety.”
Advertising remained the key driver of revenue growth for Twitter, rising 21 percent from a year ago to $575 million.
Ned Segal, Twitter’s chief financial officer, said the company saw “growth across all major products and geographies in the first quarter.”
– Beyond the core –
The move into profitability is an important achievement for Twitter, which has lost money consistently since its public offering, sparking speculation on whether it needed to sell itself to keep operating.
While Twitter has built a solid core base of celebrities, politicians and journalists, it has failed to match the broader appeal of Facebook and other social platforms, hurting its ability to bring in ad revenues.
The network has stepped up efforts to boost its user base and engagement, adding streaming video partnerships, doubling the character limit on tweets to 280 and making it easier to create “tweetstorms” by stringing messaging together.
It has also moved largely to an algorithmic-based feed using artificial intelligence that aims to deliver more tweets that drive interest and engagement.
The earnings report comes with social networks under fire over protecting private user data and curbing so-called hate speech, fake accounts manipulating public debate and incitement of violence on their platforms.
Facebook, which was set to report earnings later Wednesday, has been under fire over the hijacking of private data on some 87 million users by a consulting firm linked to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Dorsey said that at Twitter, “we believe privacy is a fundamental right for everyone” and that he does not anticipate the same kinds of issues as Facebook.
Twitter is different from Facebook, he told analysts, because “all of our data is out in the public… to make it easier for brands, researchers, to utilize.”
He added that “we do not provide any personal, identifiable data that’s not already on the service.”
