Twitter Shares Soar As Revenue Almost Doubles

Twitter (Xetra: A1W6XZ - news) 's share price rose almost 10% after-hours when the social network reported a near doubling in quarterly revenue, despite weaker than anticipated user growth.

Its latest results showed Twitter raked in $479.1m (£312.5m) during the final three months of 2014, with mobile advertising revenue amounting to 88% of the total.

Its efforts to secure more cash from outside the US also appeared to be paying off, with international revenue more than doubling on the same period last year.

However, Twitter remained loss-making at $125m (£82m) during the quarter.

The number of new Twitter users was less than expected - at four million over the three months.

It had 288 million monthly users at the end of 2014 - a rise of 20% on a year earlier - and the company's boss said the results showed that Twitter had demonstrated it was able to make money from the users it has.

Dick Costolo, who had earlier promised a crackdown on so-called trolls using Twitter (Swiss: TWTR.SW - news) - said: "We have a number of projects under way to grow our user base and provide a compelling valuable experience to anyone in the world whether they have a Twitter account or not."

He told investors in a conference call the plans involved strengthening the core Twitter service, making it easier to join and use and building new applications and services.

Twitter's biggest challenge is growing its user base as it slips behind rivals in growth terms.

LinkedIn reported 347 million users through the end of December while Facebook (NasdaqGS: FB - news) -owned photo sharing app Instagram recently surpassed 300 million users.

Facebook has 1.39 billion members.

Twitter's stock on the NYSE jumped 9% after-hours in the wake of the release of the earnings report.

Ahead of the results, the stock had fallen almost 40% over the past year largely a result of the concerns about user growth.