Twitter Q1 Earnings: Company Had First Profitable Quarter, But Lost Users Again

Twitter has announced its fourth quarter and fiscal 2017 financial results and the company has finally made its first-ever profit. Twitter said that it made $91 million during Q4 2017 on $731.6 million of revenue, which is up 2 percent from a year ago.

“Q4 was a strong finish to the year,” Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said. “We returned to revenue growth, achieved our goal of GAAP profitability, increased our shipping cadence, and reached five consecutive quarters of double digit DAU growth. I’m proud of the steady progress we made in 2017, and confident in our path ahead.”

Although Twitter had a great fourth quarter, the rest of 2017 wasn’t all too great. The company’s revenues for the fiscal year declined by 4 to 8 percent year over year. The Verge speculates that it’s possible that advertisers were reluctant to spend money on Twitter while the company faces major harassment issues.

Monthly users of Twitter also grew by 4 percent year over year. But when compared quarter to quarter, the number of monthly users on Twitter still remained at 330 million total. The most disappointing thing here is that the number of monthly users in the United States also saw a decrease from 69 million down to 68 million. This is the second time in the year that the number of monthly users on Twitter declined in the country.

The company lost a total of 2 million monthly active user for the quarter. Twitter partly blames Apple’s Safari web browser for the reduced tally of users, according to Reuters. Apple made changes to how app integrations were handled in Safari. The company is still having trouble getting new user onboard, while also struggling to convince existing users to stay.

As for average number of daily active users, Twitter says that it grew by 12 percent year over year, which also marks the fifth consecutive quarter of a double-digit growth. Twitter says that user engagement also saw a boost, which has been attributed to the fact that the company increased the character limit from 140 characters to 280.

Twitter says that its objectives include improving core ad offerings, while also delivering improvements to the platform. The company also reported that it live streamed more than 1,140 events during the fourth quarter of 2017 with 60 percent of the views coming from a global audience, according to ZDnet.

Although Twitter appears to be heading in the right direction in terms of profitability and revenue growth, the company now needs to find more ways to make sure to convince its existing users to stay while increasing its number of new users. The company was previously rumored to be planning a new feature in a future app update to make the camera more accessible, like Snapchat.