Twitter Q1 solid as daily active users, licensing, ads show growth

Twitter reported better than expected first quarter earnings as it added active users on a monthly and daily basis.

The company reported first quarter revenue of $787 million, up 18 percent from a year ago with data licensing sales of $107 million, up 20 percent from a year ago. The remainder of sales is ad revenue. Twitter reported first quarter net income of $191 million, or 25 cents a share. Adjusted earnings were 9 cents a share.

Wall Street was expecting Twitter to report earnings of 15 cents a share on revenue of $776 million.

According to Twitter, monetizable daily active users were 134 million in the first quarter, up from 120 million a year ago. Average monthly active users were 330 million, down from 320 million a year ago.

In a shareholder letter, Twitter outlined the enterprise licensing dynamics.

Data licensing and other revenue totaled $107 million, an increase of 20%. Data and enterprise solutions (DES) continues to see new customer opportunities and use cases as well as smaller customers adopting our self-service APIs. As a reminder from last quarter, we are now largely through our multiyear enterprise renewal cycle in DES. As a result, many of our largest partners are now at market pricing and data licensing revenue growth is likely to moderate for the full year.

For the second quarter, Twitter projected revenue between $770 million and $830 million with operating income between $35 million and $70 million.