Twitter doubled its ad revenues in its last quarter

Before Twitter announced earnings today, investors were still buzzing from Facebook’s stellar earnings report. But the numbers Twitter announced, especially the advertising revenue numbers, will likely have investors saying “Face what?”

The microblogging site got the basics right, with continued growth in its user base. And showed great improvements in its ability to monetize its user base, reporting earnings of 2 cents per share on revenues of $312 million, beating analysts expectations that it would 1 one cent per share on revenues of $283 million.

Revenue increased 124 percent over the $139 million Twitter reported in the second quarter last year. It’s also well up from the $250 million in revenue Twitter reported last quarter. Twitter’s stock price shot up by 33 percent in after-hours trading in response to the positive results.

The company reported a net loss of $145 million, but analysts, again, were expecting worse. Adjusted profit margin came in at 17 percent.

One of the things analysts had been looking for in today’s numbers was the continued growth of Twitter’s reach, both on the desktop and on mobile. And Twitter says it made reasonable gains in each. Average monthly active users grew to 271 million in the quarter, up from 255 million last quarter. That’s the highest monthly user growth in five quarters, the company said. Mobile monthly active users reached 211 million in the second quarter, an increase of 29 percent over last year’s second quarter.

Twitter added 16 million monthly active users to bring its total to 271 million, the biggest period of user growth since the first quarter of 2013.

Much to the delight of analysts and investors, mobile advertising has quickly become a huge driver of revenues. In the second quarter, mobile advertising revenue accounted for 81 percent of Twitter’s total advertising revenue. Facebook recently reported that 62 percent of its ad revenues were coming from mobile.

Twitter says it saw strong demand for advertising on Twitter around the World Cup this summer, pushing ad revenues up. It added that viewer engagement with ads improved by 4 percent in the quarter.

And Twitter expects another strong quarter to come, projecting revenues in the range of $330 million to $340 million.