Twitter posted its second ever quarterly profit in the opening three months of 2018, as revenue increased 21 per cent year-on-year.

CEO Jack Dorsey said the company enjoyed a strong start to the year, citing the company’s push into live video and personalised content as drivers.

“We grew our audience and engagement, marking another quarter of double-digit year-over-year [daily active user] DAU growth, and continued our work to make it easier to follow topics, interests, and events on Twitter,” he said in the company’s Q1 2018 earnings statement.

The company reported revenue of $665 million, an increase of 21 per cent year-over-year, while net income of $61 million compared with a net loss of $62 million in Q1 2017. The profit builds on Twitter’s first ever net income of $91 million recorded in Q4 2017.

Advertising revenue in the recent quarter of $575 million was up 21 per cent year-over-year, more than half of which came from video.

In a letter to shareholders, the company stated it delivered better value to advertisers during Q1, as efforts in machine learning produced a more refined experience.

“We’ve begun sharing curated timelines of tweets around breaking news events in different parts of the app, including the home timeline and search results, to make it easier to find relevant news and the surrounding conversation.”

The company also said video “remains an important component of the experience on Twitter, allowing people to post relevant live broadcasts or video clips, advertisers to use In-Stream Video Ads to reach their customers on Twitter at highly relevant moments, and content owners to extend their reach on Twitter.”

User growth
The average monthly active users (MAU) figure hit 336 million, a 3 per cent increase year-on-year, while DAU grew 10 per cent (Twitter doesn’t reveal actual figures for this metric).

Despite the MAU growth, Twitter pointed out the figure “continued to be negatively impacted by changes made to Safari’s third-party app integration, which affected approximately 1 million MAUs in Q1, and by our ongoing information quality efforts.”