The social media platform books upbeat financial figures despite costly efforts to rid Twitter of abusive posts and fake accounts.
Twitter shares jumped in pre-market trade after the social media platform reported stronger user growth and progress in its efforts to curb malicious posts.
The company, which has been spending big on improving the user experience, beat market expectations with an 18% jump in revenue to $787m in the first three months of the year compared to the same period in 2018.
It said advertising sales, also 18% higher than a year ago, accounted for the bulk of the increase – with video ads making a greater contribution.
Analysts’ eyes were on its user numbers amid predictions in some quarters that the stale performance during 2018 would continue.
Twitter, which only publicly started revealing the figures at the end of last year, said its ‘monetizable’ daily active users – which measures users exposed to advertising on a daily basis.- rose to 134 million in the three months.
hat represented a 12% increase.
The company said it remained profitable, with earnings growing more than 200% to 191m in the period aided by a tax benefit, despite operating expenses hitting $693m.
The firm blamed its crackdown on abusive user behaviour that has seen it hire more staff.
Chief executive Jack Dorsey said: “We are reducing the burden on victims and, where possible, taking action before abuse is reported.
“For example, we are now removing 2.5x more Tweets that share personal information and 38% of abusive Tweets that are taken down every week are being proactively detected by machine learning models.
