The company reported 320 million monthly active users during the fourth quarter, flat from the third quarter but up 9 percent year-over-year.
Advertisement
New sign ups have really tanked over the past year too, with just a few million per quarter signing up to the service.
Twitter shed 5.4 percent to hit a new record low of $14.87 after reports over the weekend that the company was planning to change how it display tweets.
The microblogging service forecast first-quarter revenue of between US$595 million (S$827.2 million) and US$610 million, well below the average analyst estimate of US$627.1 million according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
It’s a new era for Twitter.
Twitter is introducing algorithmic timelines for the first time, doing away with a almost ten-year history of showing updates in chronological order.
Twitter stock has lost more than 50 percent of its value since last July, when co-founder Jack Dorsey took over as chief executive.
In trying to keep up with the competition, Twitter has announced that it will revamp its entire timeline algorithm to change the way tweets are displayed henceforth. Many believe it could be the new competition, but others say it could be the result of all the changes to Twitter.
Twitter will show you these tweets in recent and reverse chronological order, while rest of the tweets will appear underneath, which will also be in reverse chronological order.
“We do not think that Moments drove a meaningful increase in users, as much of the content remains outdated or irrelevant”, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said in a note to investors last week.
An exodus of some top executives last month added to investor concerns about its ability to reignite stalled growth.
So in management’s telling, Twitter stumbled a bit on user growth, but things are picking back up apace.
The company reported fourth quarter earnings of 16 cents per share on $710 million in revenue.
But Twitter’s problem has never been about making money.
Advertisement
Twitter is nearly a decade old but hundreds of millions of people are still hooked to it. Together with Facebook and Instagram, it has remained as one of the top go-to social sites of netizens from all over the world.
