Twitter Continues Home Run With Strong Q2 Profit, Increases User Base By 5 Mn

San Francisco-headquartered social network Twitter announced its financial results for the quarter ending June 30. In the second quarter, the company reported a total revenue of $841 Mn, a Y-o-Y increase of 18%.

The company said that the total international revenue was $386 Mn, a Y-o-Y increase of 12%. Twitter said that Japan remains its second largest market, after the US, and grew at 9%. The total advertising revenue was $727 Mn, a Y-o-Y increase of 21%. Twitter said that video ad formats continued to show strength, notably from video website card, in-stream video ads, and first view ads.

Twitter said that its ongoing product improvements continued to drive growth in average monetizable DAU (mDAU), which reached 139 Mn in Q2, up 14% Y-o-Y. “We made a number of product improvements in Q2, including better relevance in Home timelines and notifications,” the company added.

In terms of expenses, Twitter’s total operating expenses, including cost of revenue, grew 21% to $766 Mn. The company said this was due to planned headcount growth and other investments in its strategic priorities. The company grew its cost of revenue, research and development expenses, sales and marketing expenses along with general and administrative expenses.

This cost has been attributed to increased video content and higher infrastructure-related expenses, higher personnel-related costs and allocated facilities costs.

The company has also repeatedly emphasised that in Q2 it made its rules easier to understand and continued to work to proactively identify and address malicious activity. This has led to 18% drop in reports of spam or suspicious behavior across all Tweet detail pages, which show the replies to any given Tweet on our service.

In the case of elections, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said during the earnings call that the company sees a lot of opportunities, but also challenges with elections.

“And one thing to keep in mind as Twitter is a global services, we have seen elections all over the world in the past two years and have learned a lot from them. Just in this past year, we saw elections in the European Union, Australia, India, and Indonesia. Our number one priority within elections and conversations on the elections — conversations around the elections is making sure we’re protecting the integrity of the conversation around the election,” he added.

It is to be noted that Twitter had been under the fire during the Indian general elections. It even was summoned by the government and also had to sign a model code of conduct for the elections.

At the time, a Parliamentary Committee, led by BJP MP Anurag Thakur, said it would examine a range of issues, which include the problem of fake news in the run-up to India’s parliamentary elections. The panel also wanted to know how Twitter India is dealing with complaints of bias and the technology it uses to detect and filter comments.

In April, Twitter appointed Manish Maheshwari to lead its Indian operations. Maheshwari took over India operations at a crucial time when the social media platform, contends with a government crackdown on fake news and misinformation. At Twitter India, Manish Maheshwari is now responsible for driving Twitter’s audience and revenue growth in the country, and overseeing Twitter India’s teams in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru.

The appointment was also notable because it comes with a high amount of threat of personal liability in case of untoward incidents. An inter-ministerial committee has made a recommendation that the India heads of the global internet and social media giants be made to face criminal proceedings in case their platforms are used for unethical campaigns or to spread fake news that leads to lynching and riots.

Going forward in Q3, Twitter expects total revenue to be between $815 Mn and $875 Mn with operating income between $45 Mn and $80 Mn.

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.