Yahoo Finance Twitter grows user numbers after purging fake and abusive accounts
Twitter has added around eight million new users in the first three months of 2019 after two quarters of declines, as it targeted abusive and fake accounts.
The US company said it had around 134 million average daily average users in the first quarter of 2019, compared to 126 million for the previous quarter, and 120 million in the same period last year.
The rise comes as Twitter shifts to new metrics, and next quarter it will stop disclosing how many monthly active users it has. In this quarter, it reported both sets of metrics.
From the second quarter of this year, the company will only report on what it terms "monetisable daily active users", meaning those who logged on and accessed Twitter every day.
Twitter announced it would be making the change earlier this year, after seeing user numbers slip for two straight quarters, something it had blamed on its purge of fake accounts and bots last year.
In the latest results on Tuesday, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey said the company was "taking a more proactive approach" to abuse, looking to "reducing the burden on victims and, where possible, taking action before abuse is reported".
The company has removed around 2.5 times more tweets which share personal information, it said, and more than a third of abusive tweets, which are taken down, are now being identified by machine learning models.
Earlier this year Twitter tested new features that would allow users to block or mute replies in a bid to curb abuse on its site. The new settings were first discovered by Jane Manchun Wong, a US-based computer scientist.
Twitter also decided to force users to provide a confirmation of an email or phone number to sign up to the service.
Shares in Twitter were up by almost 8pc in pre-market trade on Tuesday, and pulled other social media companies such as Snap higher.
Twitter posted revenue of $787m, ahead of analyst forecasts for $776.1m and largely driven by strong growth in digital advertising, whilst earnings per share came in at 37 cents, more than double the expectations of 15 cents.
Jim Cridlin, global head of innovation at WPP's Mindshare, said: "Given the strength of the duopoly (of Google and Facebook), Twitter can get overlooked by advertisers, but the consistent growth Twitter has shown over the past few quarters suggests advertisers should be giving them another look.
“Twitter has done a lot to clarify their proposition for both consumers and advertisers; that effort seems to be paying off as advertising investment is following."
Twitter signalled it expected the strong performance to continue into the second quarter, and now forecasts revenue will come in between $770m and $830m, and operating income between $35m and $70m.
