Skip to main content

Twitter hits 255 million users but slow growth worrying investors

twitter
PIXXart / Shutterstock

Twitchy Twitter investors sent the company’s share price tumbling by more than 10 percent in after-hours trading Tuesday after the company’s growth figures for Q1 2014 failed to impress.

The microblogging service picked up 14 million new users during the first three months of the year, marking growth of 5.8 percent and taking its user base to 255 million. For long-term investors, however, the figure appeared to disappoint, with a drop in year-on-year timeline views for the quarter apparently adding to their angst. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo explained the dip in views as partly the result of the company refining its service, allowing users to be more focused in the way they engage with the service. The data caused shares to drop by just over 10 percent to $37.79 in after-hours trading Tuesday.

Related Videos

The company posted a net loss of $132 million – four times greater than a year earlier – though revenue came in at $250 million, up 119 percent on 12 months ago. Of the $250 million, $226 million came from mobile advertising.

“We had a very strong first quarter. Revenue growth accelerated on a year over year basis fueled by increased engagement and user growth,” Costolo said on the company’s website, adding, “We also continue to rapidly increase our reach and scale.”

In an earnings call following the release of its Q1 financial results, Costolo highlighted some big numbers, drawing attention to the three billion views of Oscars-related tweets in March, as well as significant user engagement with other major events like February’s Super Bowl. He added that there’d been a 26 percent jump in the number of tweets people favorited or retweeted.

In recent months, Twitter has rolled out a slew of changes to its service with the aim of improving the user experience, putting more focus on images and altering the way profiles are shown on the Web version of the social media site.

Twitter landed on the stock exchange in November last year. Shares sold for $26, peaking in February at $73.71.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
TikTok should be expelled from app stores, senator says
TikTok icon illustration.

The wildly popular TikTok app continues to come under pressure from U.S. lawmakers.

Many are concerned that ByteDance, the Beijing-based company behind the app, has close ties with the Chinese government, and that laws in China mean it could be required to hand over user data to the government to assist in intelligence gathering.

Read more
Yay! Twitter has just become less annoying
Twitter logo in white stacked on top of a blue stylized background with the Twitter logo repeating in shades of blue.

A couple of weeks after Twitter said it was working on it, the company has finally updated its Android and iPhone apps so that you once again return to the timeline that you were looking at last.

https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1622656511792271360

Read more
Twitter expands tweet character limit massively
A lot of white Twitter logos against a blue background.

If you often find that 280 characters are too few for you to be able to effectively express yourself on Twitter, then perhaps 4,000 characters will suffice.

Beginning on Wednesday, Twitter now lets you post tweets with a maximum of 4,000 characters, 28.6 times more than the mere 140 characters available when Twitter launched in 2006, and 14.3 times more than the current limit of 240.

Read more