Twitter reported more than $1bn in revenue within the first few months of 2021, exceeding its earnings from the same quarter in 2020 by 28 per cent.
The social media company also reported a net income of $68m, following an $8.4m loss within the same time period last year.
Its self-proclaimed “solid start” to 2021 is its first without one of its most famous users, whose presence on the timeline upended daily news cycles for several years and fuelled chaos that led to his permanent ban.
Twitter permanently suspended Donald Trump from the platform on 8 January “due to the risk of further incitement of violence” just two days after a deadly insurrection at the US Capitol, propelled by his supporters’ belief in the now-former president’s false narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
The company’s stock was down as much as 10 per cent on Thursday following the company’s earnings report, which also reported falling short on user growth targets.
Still, the company saw a 20 per cent spike in daily active users – nearly 200 million – who see ads. It also reported that it expects revenue between $980m and $1.08bn in the second quarter.
The former president – who now issues tweet-like messages in the form of press releases from his office in Florida – has insisted that Twitter is “not the same” since he was booted from the platform for promoting baseless election fraud conspiracies.
He told right-wing network Newsmax in February that the platform has since become “very boring” without him, and claimed that “millions of people are leaving.”
“They’re leaving it because it’s not the same and I can understand that ... It’s become very boring,” he said. “We don’t want to go back to Twitter.”
He echoed his remarks during an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity last week in his first sit-down interview after leaving office.
“I’m really getting the big word out because we’re doing releases,” he said. “Every time I do a release, it’s all over the place. It’s better than Twitter, much more elegant than Twitter. And Twitter now is very boring. A lot of people are leaving Twitter. Twitter is becoming very, very boring.”
The former president posted more than 56,000 times from his first in 2009 to his last in his final days in the White House, according to an archive of his account.
