Twitter saw a slight dip in monthly active users during the second quarter of 2018, but exceeded revenue expectations.
The number of monthly active users on Twitter dropped from 336 million in Q1 2018 to 335 million in Q2 2018. The decline in MAUs came from the U.S., while the number of international MAUs remained flat. The company saw revenue of $711 million, up from $665 million last quarter. Twitter reported a GAAP net income of $100 million, its third straight profitable quarter.
This quarter, Twitter dealt with the rollout of GDPR and continued efforts to purge the site of spam and bot accounts. In June, the company said it was now proactively identifying and “challenging” 9.9 million spam accounts per week. The move is part of Twitter’s ongoing efforts to promote more “healthy conversation” on the platform.
“We don’t think this work [around health] will necessarily ever be done, it’s one of those things like security and privacy as it constantly evolves,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said during the earnings call. “We made a major shift this year in shifting more of our model and enforcement towards behavior and conduct on the platform, rather than content. That’s entirely machine learning and deep learning-driven.”
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“Average MAUs were 335M for Q2, an increase of 9M y/y and -1M q/q, reflecting impact from decisions we have made to prioritize the health of the platform, to not move to paid SMS carrier relationships in certain markets and, to a lesser extent, GDPR,” the company’s investor relations account tweeted. The company also cautioned that MAUs could continue to decline by “mid-single-digit-millions” in Q3.
The number of daily active users grew 11 percent year-over-year in Q2, but Twitter did not give an exact number of current DAUs.
The company also highlighted its investment in video, noting that it signed 50 new agreements for its livestreaming, highlight, Amplify, and video-on-demand offerings in Q2.
