Social-media company’s profit more than triples to $191 million
Twitter’s number of daily users rose 6% to a record 134 million in the first quarter and the company plans to boost spending to promote healthy discourse. PHOTO: DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Twitter Inc. TWTR -0.03% reported record daily users and rising profit on Tuesday, signs that the company’s product tweaks are stabilizing the business.
The number of daily users rose 6% in the first quarter to 134 million from 126 million in the previous three months, driven primarily by strength in international markets.
Revenue rose 18% to $787 million in the first quarter, up from $665 million a year earlier. The result was a sequential decline from the fourth quarter, which is typically the heaviest spending period for advertisers, but topped analyst projections of $774 million, according to FactSet.
Net income in the first quarter increased to $191 million, from $61 million a year earlier, and marked the company’s sixth consecutive quarter of profitability after years of sustained losses.
Central to Twitter’s changes is an effort to promote healthy discourse, after the company has struggled to rein in toxic behavior.
The company is also trying to make the platform more conversational.
Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey said his company is now taking a more proactive approach to addressing abuse and its effects on the platform.
“We are reducing the burden on victims and, where possible, taking action before abuse is reported,” Mr. Dorsey said.
Earlier this month, Twitter announced that it was using technology to proactively surface abusive tweets to its teams for review. Previously, Twitter users had to flag offending tweets before the company would remove them. Now, about 38% of abusive content that Twitter takes down is surfaced by the machine learning algorithms.
This isn’t the first time Twitter has used this technology, but previously it was applied to tracking spam rather than abuse.
Twitter is also now using a new appeals process to better prioritize tweets it should remove that contain private, personal information about its users. Twitter now removes 2.5 times more tweets than previously that share personal information since the launch of this feature.
For Twitter’s business, trying to reduce abuse and negative content can cut both ways. In previous quarters, declines in user accounts were attributed in part to efforts to purge more of the spam and accounts that violated Twitter’s rules.
Still, a platform with less abuse could retain more users and assuage marketers’ fears about advertising alongside offensive tweets.
Twitter is now working to make its platform more conversational. The company is testing a new version of its app, called twttr, that threads message replies in a more intuitive design that makes it easier to follow discussions.
The company also plans to start experimenting with ways to give people more control over their conversations by giving users the option to hide replies to their tweets.
Twitter also made other tweaks to its platform in the quarter that helped drive more people to its app and bolster the effectiveness of ads on the app, including refining its algorithm to show users more personalized tweets and adjusting the size of its video player.
“We’ve never been more confident in our strategy and execution,” Twitter Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal said.
The company expanded its head count in the first quarter to about 4,100, from about 3,900 the previous quarter.
Looking forward, Twitter plans to spend more on promoting healthy discourse on the platform and expects operating expenses to rise by approximately 20% in 2019.
Twitter projects revenue to also increase, to between $770 million and $830 million for the second quarter.
Write to Georgia Wells at Georgia.Wells@wsj.com
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