Twitter Stock Price: 3 Takeaways From Quarterly Earnings Report
Twitter’s second-quarter earnings release Thursday included a mix of good and bad news for the microblogging service. Here’s the biggest takeaways from the company’s update on its financials:
User growth struggles continue
Among investors, the bigger problem with Twitter has been the site’s user base. For the quarter, the site posted a zero percent change in monthly active users as it remained steady at 328 million users. The news is a comedown from the previous quarter, when Twitter added nine million accounts. Within the U.S., Twitter also lost two million monthly active users, dropping from 70 million to 68 million users.
For its part, Twitter has encouraged investors to focus on other areas for user engagement. According to Twitter, the site saw a 12 percent year-over-year jump in daily active usage and it marked the third consecutive quarter with double-digit growth. Twitter defines daily active usage as users who log in or use Twitter each day on any of its platforms.
Read: Twitter Adds Nine Million New Users, But Revenue Growth Lacking
In a statement, CEO Jack Dorsey said he was confident in the company’s approach to developing and engaging with its users.
"We’re strengthening our execution, which gives us confidence that our product improvements will continue to contribute to meaningful increases in daily active usage,” Dorsey said. “We’re also encouraged by the progress we’re making executing against our top revenue generating priorities as we focus on making Twitter the best place to see and share what's happening, where you can see every side and perspective.”
Despite the site’s high-profile users, who include celebrities and President Donald Trump, Twitter has struggled to translate this into sustained growth for investors. Revenue growth for the company has largely been stagnant for the past few years and for the rest of 2017, Twitter said that it doesn’t expect to see improvements in revenue growth rate.
With users, Twitter also touted its work curbing abusive accounts on the platform with updates like its quality filtering. According to Twitter, it has taken action on 10 times more abusive accounts than it did last year. Handling hate speech and other persistent targeted abuse has been a struggle for Twitter and the service’s inability to curb these users reportedly prevented a potential purchase by Disney last year.
Revenue better and worse than expected
Investors have generally been down on Twitter for a while, but the service managed to beat negative expectations in one area. According to Reuters, analysts had predicted Twitter would bring in only $536 million in revenue, but the site still pulled in $574 million for the quarter.
However, the mark was still a 5 percent drop in year-over-year earnings for Twitter. Advertising revenue saw similar dips, as Twitter’s $489 million for the quarter beat analyst expectations of $458 million, but still represented an 8 percent year-over-year drop.
Read: Twitter Updates Notifications Tab, Adds Information It Thinks Users Find 'Interesting'
Elsewhere, Twitter also reported a GAAP net loss of $116 million for the quarter. It’s a slight bump in year-over-year losses, as the site posted a loss of $107 million last year. In part from these numbers, Twitter shares opened trading Thursday down around 13 percent at $17.39 per share.
Pivoting to video
One of Twitter’s biggest gambles to spur higher user engagement has been its increased investments in live and streaming video content. Through the platform, users can tune in to watch broadcasts ranging from live sports to financial news. At the moment, the strategy is seeing healthy returns: Twitter said it had a video viewership of 55 million users for the quarter and this represented an audience jump of around 22 percent.
The site’s video offerings also saw a similar upswing with around 1,200 hours of broadcast content for the quarter. According Twitter, the site previously broadcast 900 hours of content in the first quarter of 2017 and 600 hours of content the previous quarter.
However, Twitter is hardly the only company to get into video in a bid for better user engagement and ad revenue numbers. Competitors like Snapchat and Facebook have all launched their own original video content divisions and as the online advertising market gets increasingly crowded, investors and advertisers will likely want to keep an eye on returns. Despite a 95 percent year-over-year increase in total ad engagements, the company still saw drops in cost engagement rates and overall ad revenue.
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