Business on Twitter is doing better than expected.

The short message service outperformed analysts' forecasts with its figures for the past quarter and the outlook for the next few months.

The stock rose more than five percent in after-hours US trading on Thursday.

The turnover of Twitter grew in the second quarter year-on-year by 74 percent to nearly 1.2 billion dollars (a good one billion euros). A good billion had been expected on the market. The service took its first steps in the past quarter with its subscription product as an additional source of income to advertising revenues. For the current quarter, Twitter promised sales of up to $ 1.3 billion.

The number of daily active users that Twitter can reach with advertising in its own apps or in the web version rose from 199 to 206 million within three months.

At the same time, it declined by one million to 37 million in the home market of the USA, where more than half of Twitter's revenues were recently generated.

Twitter explained this, among other things, with a quieter news situation.

The service banned then US President Donald Trump from the platform in early January.

Twitter is profitable

The bottom line was that Twitter made $ 65.65 million after a loss of $ 1.38 billion a year earlier, largely due to a tax provision of nearly $ 1.1 billion.

A large part of Twitter's advertising revenue comes from doing business with companies that want to get tweets about their products in the news stream of users for a fee.

Twitter sees fewer problems with this than, for example, Facebook in the new data protection rules on the iPhone.

Apple gives iPhone users the ability to stop tracking their activity across different apps and websites.

Facebook, which relies more on personalized advertising, criticized this sharply.

Subscribers can correct tweets

Twitter launched its first functions only for subscription customers in June, initially only in Australia and Canada.

In a conference call with analysts, company boss Jack Dorsey initially gave no information about when it could be introduced in other countries.

First, they want to gain experience in the first two markets.

One of the subscription functions is that users can edit finished tweets for 30 seconds.

Twitter will try more new functions - and if they do not work, also abolish them, announced Dorsey.

The service had recently crushed the tweets ("Fleets") that were introduced only last year.

The Twitter boss also showed interest in the digital currency Bitcoin. It could become a kind of global Internet currency and simplify transactions on Twitter, he said.