It’s two in a row for Twitter Inc. TWTR -3.62%
After 16 straight quarters of losses to start its life as a public company, the social-media company Wednesday reported its second consecutive profitable quarter, a heartening sign as it works to turn the attention of its users into a viable business.
Twitter said it expects to be profitable for the full year. It had reported its first three months in the black as a publicly traded company in the quarter ended Dec. 31, after having set a goal of “driving toward” profitability in 2017.
Revenue in the first quarter rose 21% from a year earlier to $664.9 million. The company said video ads now account for more than half its revenue. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters had expected $605.4 million in revenue.
Twitter posted a profit of $61 million, or 8 cents a share, compared with a loss of $61.6 million, or a 9 cents a share, a year earlier. On an adjusted basis, per-share earnings came in at 16 cents, above the 12 cents analysts expected.
The quarterly profit was small. Still, the growth was important because investors wanted to see whether Twitter’s performance was a blip or the start of a trend, said Youssef Squali, an analyst with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey Inc.
“It seems like momentum is accelerating,” Mr. Squali said. “2018 is shaping up to be pretty strong.”
Shares rose 2.3% in premarket trading following the report.
Twitter said it added six million people who use its product monthly during the quarter, bringing the total to 336 million. Analysts expected Twitter to add 5 million monthly users, according to FactSet. The company now has 69 million monthly users in the U.S. and 267 million abroad.
Twitter said the number of users who use its product daily grew 10% from a year ago, a smaller rate of growth than seen last year. The company doesn’t disclose the actual number of daily users.
Advertising revenue rose 21% to $575 million as users engaged with more sponsored posts, the company said, even as the cost of those sponsored engagements fell.
“We saw broad-based strength this quarter across products, across geographies, and we were thrilled to see the momentum continue in the conversations that we were having with advertisers,” Ned Segal, Twitter’s financial chief, said on a conference call with analysts. He said he believes video can account for an even greater share of Twitter’s revenue going forward.
Twitter said its global revenue from data licensing and other areas rose 20%. Data, which makes up about 13% of Twitter’s revenue, has been a bright spot as its margins are wider than those for its ad business.
Twitter collects information about what users tweet publicly, for example, to help brands figure out how people feel about their products. The company, though, has come under scrutiny for selling data about its users’ tweets.
On the call with analysts, Chief Executive Jack Dorsey defended the business, saying Twitter doesn’t provide any personal data that isn’t already visible on the social network. “We are different from our peers in that Twitter is public,” Mr. Dorsey said.
For the current quarter, Twitter projected adjusted earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization of between $245 million and $265 million—more than the $217 million analysts expect, according to FactSet.
“Twitter’s like this boxer that might not land a knockout punch, but they keep slugging away,” said Jim Cridlin, global head of innovation at WPP PLC’s Mindshare unit, which buys ads for clients, including on Twitter.
—Austen Hufford contributed to this article
Write to Georgia Wells at Georgia.Wells@wsj.com