Twitter Surprises With Strong Q2 2019 User Numbers, Amidst Fake Accounts Problem

Twitter reported surprisingly strong second-quarter user numbers and revenue Friday, as it works to make platform more user-friendly and eliminate robotic and fake accounts on its platform. 

On that front, social media messaging service said instances of suspicious behaviour and spam dropped by 18% during quarter. 

But Twitter’s push to cut down on fake accounts costs money, and its justed profit fell 36% to about $37 million, or 5 cents per share. At same time, revenue surged 18%, to $841 million, better than $829 million that Wall Street was looking for, according to a survey by FactSet. In April, Twitter h forecast revenue of $770 million to $830 million for quarter.  

Twitter’s daily user base rose 14% to 139 million, an increase of 5 million users. Analysts were expecting 134.7 million daily users.  

revenue surge was due to higher vertising revenue. company said it is on track to hire 20% more people than last year. 

“ health first conversation is a way to continue to grow audience, our revenue product and sales and platform,” said CFO Ned Segal. “And so  hecount growth is really thinking about all of those areas.” 

San Francisco company started disclosing its daily user base earlier this year. se are users who log into site at least once a day and see vertisements on platform. This metric has replaced its monthly user number disclosures. 

Segal said user growth was bro-based, both in U.S. and internationally, driven by site’s continued relevance in national conversation. 

“We look at this 14% year-over-year growth we delivered and we see cumulative benefit of last few years of work that we’ve done to improve service to drive relevance to make Twitter more conversational, to make it easier to find topic and events that people care about most,” Segal said. 

Twitter has been trying to improve what company calls “health” of conversations on its platform amid widespre criticism that it doesn’t do eugh to remove hate speech, abuse and harassment. 

In a call with analysts, CEO Jack Dorsey said “health” remains top priority. 

“Health is a long-term growth factor for us, and we have been doubling our efforts to make sure that we can dress all issues that we’re seeing on service,” he said. “A big focus for us over past year has been to proactively identify content on Twitter that would violate our rules so that we don’t require a report.” 

In June, company began placing warning labels on abusive and orwise offending tweets by politicians and world leers. Twitter has long argued that tweets from world leers are in public interest and should remain even if y violate site’s terms. This became an issue with election of President Donald Trump, who routinely uses Twitter to dispar enemies and rile up supporters. 

With new feature, users have to tap through warning to see underlying mess, but tweet won’t be removed, as Twitter might do with a regular person’s posts. 

Twitter has redesigned its website in an attempt to make it simpler to use and encour exploration. People who use Twitter on a desktop computer rar than mobile tend to be more serious users who tweet for work — social media professionals, journalists and like. 

Twitter’s shares jumped $3.66, or 9.6%, to $41.76 in afteron tring. 

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