Twitter on Thursday rallied more than 11 per cent in pre-market activity, after it announced better than expected earnings and revenues, and significantly increased its active userbase on the platform.
The social media company posted first quarter revenues of $548m, down 8 per cent year over year, marking the first fall in sales on record, but still exceeding estimates. It recorded a net loss of $62m, significantly less than the $167m loss it made in the previous quarter and also better than expectations.
“We’re proud to report accelerating growth in daily active usage for the fourth consecutive quarter, up 14 per cent year-over-year,” said Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO. “While we continue to face revenue headwinds, we believe that executing on our plan and growing our audience should result in positive revenue growth over the long term.”
While the company did not disclose the actual number of daily active users, it disclosed that its monthly active users grew to 328m, 9m more than the previous quarter and about 7m more than expected.
Declining revenues were put down to the fact that the company had certain types of ad formats, with the outlook for the second quarter being worse than expected.
However, Twitter CFO Anthony Noto highlighted the company’s live video performance, saying: “We’re proud of our performance in Live after just six months – last quarter alone we streamed more than 800 hours of live premium video and reached 45m unique viewers, an increase of 31 per cent from the previous quarter.”
Although Twitter lost the rights to livestreaming NFL games to Amazon, Mr Dorsey told Buzzfeed today that it planned to launch a 24/7 Twitter live video channel.
