Twitter user number also increases after Trump was expelled

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In the past few months, Twitter has been the center of attention when it comes to tweets from Donald Trump. Now the US election is over, the ex-president has been banned from the platform until further notice - but Twitter emphasizes that this is not a disadvantage for business.

TWitter wants to let the world know that the service can do just fine without ex-President Donald Trump. In January the number of users grew faster than the average for the past four years, the short message service emphasized on Tuesday. Trump's account had been suspended indefinitely after his supporters' attack on the US Capitol in early January.

It's uncommon for Twitter to reveal information about what's going on in a single month - but the service referred to the unusual circumstances. Trump was considered a crowd puller for Twitter. In recent years, his often controversial tweets have attracted a lot of attention, most recently around the US presidential election.

However, Twitter boss Jack Dorsey emphasized that the service does not depend solely on news and politics. "We are a platform that is obviously larger than every single topic and every single account," he said in a conference call with analysts on the latest quarterly figures. Sports events, major award ceremonies and entertainment are also important.

In the past quarter the growth in the number of users accelerated again somewhat. For some time now, Twitter has only cited the number of users that the service can reach daily with its advertising in its own apps or in the web version. It rose from 187 to 192 million within three months. Twitter had cracked down on extremist views and misinformation about the virus and vaccines in the US election campaign and the Corona crisis. Some of the measures would have had a "small but measurable" negative effect on user numbers.

Revenue rose 28 percent year over year to approximately $ 1.29 billion. Quarterly profits jumped from just under $ 119 million to $ 222 million. For the current quarter, Twitter expects at least a 16 percent increase in sales to $ 940 million.

Twitter mainly makes its money with advertising products such as the ability to place tweets in users' timelines. At the same time, unspecified subscription ideas should be experimented with but they would not make a noticeable contribution to sales before the coming year, it said on Tuesday. But Twitter still sees great potential in personalized advertising. After all, you know what a user is currently interested in. At the same time, Twitter should become more useful thanks to algorithms that filter messages according to the interests of users.

In an initial reaction to the numbers in after-hours trading, the share initially fell by five percent, but then turned positive and at times rose by more than three percent.