Twitter is profitable again in 1st quarter, grows overseas

Twitter, driven by strong growth overseas, swung to a profit during the first quarter of the year, its second profitable quarter ever after a strong finish last year.

Shares climbed 4 per cent before the market open on Wednesday. The company can now say that those good numbers weren't a blip, since it has now notched a first-quarter profit of $61 million. That's down a little from the $91 million it made in the previous three months, but the news is good enough to get the champagne corks popping in San Francisco.

Revenue increased sharply to US $664.9 million from US $548.3 million, bolstered by a 53 per cent jump in international revenue. The performance easily beat the US $609.9 million in revenue that analysts projected.

Daily active users increased 10 per cent, but that's down from 12 per cent growth in the fourth quarter and 14 per cent growth a year ago. It had 336 million monthly average users in the quarter, up from the 330 million in the previous quarter and the 319 million users a year earlier.

Twitter attributes this growth to a number of factors, including the addition of several new products like bookmarks and video timestamps. Efforts to create "new, curated timelines of tweets around breaking news events," are also helping to drive engagement, and eyeballs.

The company is also saying that it's seeing results in its information quality and safety work: euphemisms for a crackdown on malicious bot-and-troll activity.

Twitter's been dealing with several broader problems. It's struggled to get people to sign up, despite the attention President Donald Trump's no-holds barred tweets have drawn to the company. 

Part of the issue is that anyone can read tweets without signing up. As a result, Twitter's user base pales compared with Facebook and the Facebook-owned Instagram.

Twitter has also wrestled with hate speech and abusive comments, fake accounts and attempts by Russian agents to spread misinformation on the site.