Twitter vows to boost user ranks and revenue

Twitter said Thursday it wants to swell its ranks of users, offer more features, and double revenue in the next two years.

Twitter chief Jack Dorsey outlined the goals in a filing with US financial markets regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission, causing shares to climb nearly 10 percent.

Twitter aims to reach a milestone of 315 million “monetizable” users in 2023, compared with the 192 million it had at the end of last year, according to the filing.

The global one-to-many message broadcasting platform defined monetizable users as people who log in daily and can be shown ads.

Twitter, like Google and Facebook, makes most of its money from digital advertising.

Investors also seemed encouraged by word that the San Francisco-based internet firm is aiming for $7.5 billion in revenue in 2023, more than double the $3.7 billion it took in last year.

Twitter also plans to double “development velocity,” meaning the number of new features it releases per employee to get people to engage more with the service.

It was the first time that Twitter announced long-term financial goals and came on an annual “analysts day” at the company.