Twitter's audience is growing again as it works to combat abuse

Twitter (TWTR) said Tuesday that it had 330 million monthly active users in the first three months of 2019, an increase of 9 million from the quarter prior, which breaks its streak of three consecutive quarters of user declines.

In the United States, Twitter added two million monthly users during the quarter. The social network is still below the 336 million users it had worldwide a year ago.

At the same time, people are engaging more with Twitter. The company said 134 million daily active users were able to view ads and promoted tweets on the service in the first quarter, an increase of 11% from the same period a year ago.

Twitter said in February that it planned to focus on this daily user number as it looks to build a service that people want to use every day. The monthly active user metric, long a focus of investors who track Twitter, will no longer be included with its earnings reports after this quarter.

More engaged eyeballs may mean more ad dollars. Twitter posted revenue of $787 million for the quarter, up 18% from the same period a year ago and more than Wall Street had expected. The company credited this growth in part to traction for video ad formats.

The stronger-than-expected sales performance also helped boost Twitter's profit. The company made $191 million during the quarter, up from $61 million a year ago.

Twitter's stock was up 8% in pre-market trading Tuesday following the earnings results.

Combating abuse

The renewed growth in users comes as Twitter invests more heavily in trying to combat abuse on the platform after years of criticism.

"We are taking a more proactive approach to reducing abuse on Twitter and its effects in 2019, with the goal of reducing the burden on victims of abuse and,where possible, taking action before abuse is reported," the company said in a shareholder letter Tuesday.

Earlier this month, the company said that "38% of abusive content that's enforced" is now flagged proactively without relying on users reporting it. A year ago, none of it was flagged proactively.

"It's a pretty terrible situation when you're coming to a service where, ideally, you want to learn something about the world, and you spend a majority of your time reporting abuse, receiving harassment," Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said at TED 2019. "Last year, we decided that we're going to apply a lot more machine learning, a lot more deep learning to the problem, and try to be a lot more proactive, so we can take the burden off the victim completely."

Separately, Twitter introduced a prototype app called Twttr, where it's testing new features to "read, understand, and join conversations" on the platform.

"Twitter appears to be more actively evolving the user experience," John Egbert, an analyst with Stifel, wrote in an investor note on Monday.

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