Twitter said in an earnings call Tuesday it's using a new metric to measure activity to replace the old method. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI |
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April 23 (UPI) -- Twitter stock soared Tuesday after the company announced in an earnings call it's added monetizable daily active users and is taking a proactive approach to weed out abusive content.
Twitter said in its earnings call it had 134 million of the monetizable users during the first three months of 2019 -- classified as users who log in and access Twitter on an application that displays advertisements. Twitter said the new metric will replace the "monthly active users" figure it's historically used to measure activity.
Shares of Twitter climbed early Tuesday on the earnings news.
Twitter said during the call it's also deployed new machine-learning models to find abusive tweets before they are reported. In the first quarter, it said, 38 percent of the tweets taken down for abusive content were proactively detected. Twitter has also gotten better at identifying content that can cause severe or immediate harm to users, CEO Jack Dorsey said during the call.
"We will continue working to proactively reduce abuse on Twitter and its effects, with the goal of reducing the burden on victims of abuse and, ideally, taking action before abuse is reported," Twitter wrote in its first quarter letter to shareholders.
The social media giant reported revenues of $787 million in the first quarter, an increase of 18 percent. In the United States alone, revenue was up 25 percent to $432 million. Twitter reported ad engagements rose 23 percent, resulting from higher ad impressions and improved clickthrough rates across the platform.
Twitter now has more than 4,100 employees, an increase of 18 percent from a year ago, and the company said it plans to keep hiring throughout 2019.
