Twitter sales hit $1 billion for the first time

Twitter reached a financial milestone, pulling in $1 billion in quarterly revenue for the first time in the company's history, ending 2019 on a bright note.

That's according to earnings posted by the social media company on Thursday.

Most of the revenue growth came from the United States, where the company is facing scrutiny over efforts to tackle misinformation around the 2020 election.

Twitter's also been under pressure to make its platform more user-friendly, and efforts to do so appear to have paid off.

Twitter was able to sign up more subscribers. The number of monetizable daily active users rose to a stronger-than-expected 152 million in the fourth quarter, up from 126 million the same period the year before.

That led to better-than-expected quarterly sales.

But profits disappointed, as did the company's first-quarter sales outlook.

Like many social media companies, Twitter is spending more to clean up its platform.

Twitter took the bold step of banning political ads, a move its larger rival Facebook has not matched, choosing instead to simply tweak its policy on political ads.

Shares of Twitter were on the rise in Thursday trading.