Twitter reports its first profitable quarter
Twitter on Thursday reported its first quarterly net profit — $91 million — after it slashed expenses and its revenue beat analysts' expectations, Recode reported. The microblogging company's inability to start making money had confounded Wall Street, given its broad reach and popularity among celebrities and power brokers, including President Trump.
The company said it also expected to show profit, using generally accepted accounting principles, for the full year in 2018. Still, Twitter's user growth missed expectations, falling flat for the quarter at 330 million monthly active users, although that marked a 4 percent increase from a year earlier. A change to Apple's Safari web browser cost Twitter about 2 million active users. The company also stepped up efforts to reduce spam and automated or fake accounts, according to Reuters. Twitter shares shot up by 20 percent after the report.
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Harold Maass is a contributing editor at The Week. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 debut of the U.S. print edition and served as editor of TheWeek.com when it launched in 2008. Harold started his career as a newspaper reporter in South Florida and Haiti. He has previously worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, ABC News and Fox News, and for several years wrote a daily roundup of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance.
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