Twitter exceeds expectations in Q3 2017, adding 4m users, as losses narrow
- Thursday, October 26th, 2017
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Twitter added 4m users in Q3 2017 from the previous quarter, taking its monthly active user (MAU) base to 330m and representing a four per cent year-on-year (YoY) increase. This comes after admitting it had overstated – and has revised – its user base going back three years, as it accidentally counted users of a third-party app as its own.
The microblogging site also grew its average daily active users (DAUs) by 14 per cent compared to the previous year, meaning its DAU base has seen double-digit growth in each of the last four quarters. Despite this, Twitter still refuses to report concrete figures on how many people use its platform every day.
These statistics were released as part of Twitter’s earnings report for the third quarter of 2017.
Twitter posted a quarterly revenue of $590m, a decrease of four per cent YoY. Despite this, its net losses narrowed to $21m, down from the £103m it recorded in losses for the same period last year, while adjusted EBITDA sat at $207m – compared to $181m in Q3 2017.
“This quarter we made progress in three key areas of our business: we grew our audience and engagement, made progress on a return to revenue growth, and achieved record profitability,” said Jack Dorsey, Twitters CEO. “Were proud that the improvements were making to the product continue to bring people back to Twitter on a daily basis. Its our job to help people stay informed about what’s happening in the world and what people are talking about, and were focused on making our service faster, easier to use, and more relevant to more people every day.”
On the back of the successful quarter, Twitter has seen stocks jump by as much as 12 per cent, and has gone as far as predicting that it will become profitable – for the first time since it went public – in the next quarter.
“Twitter has learned from its mistakes in the past quarter, and this is shown in the results presented today,” said Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CEO at Socialbakers. “The introduction of the new 280-character tweet limit is already paying off. This departure from its traditional character limit is a huge step forward to marketers. They have now more room to get their message across and drive targeted engagement with specific audiences. This demonstrates to marketers that advertising on Twitter is still valuable.
“Twitter is definitely on the right path to regain commitment from marketers. Yet, it needs to continue proving they are still a worthwhile investment by innovating and adding new features such as the recently successful 280-character tweet trial. But why stop at 280? 560 characters would add even more context to Twitters algorithms to better understand the audience, improve targeting quality and help marketers personalize their message. This? will ultimately reassure marketers that the platform can appeal to their audiences and offer ROI.”
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