Three times a charm for Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.
The micro-blogging site hit all the right notes on Tuesday when it reported earnings for the three months ended in June — sending the stock up a sensational 33 percent in late trading.
It was Costolo’s third time reporting earnings since Twitter took its stock public in a big splashy IPO last year. And it’s the first earnings report that hasn’t sent the stock plummeting amid fears that Twitter is having trouble growing and retaining users.
Costolo said revenue for the second quarter rose 124 percent over last year, to $312 million, well above Wall Street’s expectations of $283 million in sales.
The company’s losses widened to $144.6 million, or 24 cents a share, from losses of $42 million last year. But excluding expenses and items, Twitter earned 2 cents a share, above analysts’ expectations for a net loss excluding items of 1 cent a share.
Twitter also raised its revenue forecast for the upcoming third quarter to between $330 million and $340 million, above analysts’ projections for $324 million.
The stock jumped as much as 33 percent in late trading to above $50 a share after closing up 1.7 percent on Tuesday at $38.59 a share.
Costolo said monthly active users — a measure of how many people are using the site — hit 271 million by the end of June, an increase of 24 percent over last year. Timeline views — a measure of how much time users spend on the site — grew by 15 percent over last year, to 173 billion.
Timeline views had become a primary cause for consternation on Wall Street in the last two quarters when views fell below a high of 159 billion in the third quarter of 2013, before the company went public.
Costolo predicted continued user growth engagement from services like the one the company used around the FIFA World Cup in Brazil. Leading up to the World Cup games, Twitter allowed fans to more easily follow tweets around their favorite teams and on the games in general.
“That has given me confidence that we can create great user experience by organizing content around live events,” Costolo said in the conference call.
He also said he expects the company to start benefiting from advertising dollars for logged-out users — or active users who check Twitter without logging in and retweeting.
Costolo continued to predict that Twitter will one day “reach the largest audience in the world” and “everyone on the planet.”
Despite its second-quarter successes, Twitter still has a long way to go before it even catches up to Facebook, which boasts 1.3 billion monthly active users.