Twitter Reports First-Ever Quarterly Profit Despite Stagnant User Growth

Twitter has reported its first ever quarterly profit in its latest Q4 financial results, but continues to struggle to entice new, long-term users.

According to a report from Recode, the social media site reported net income of $91 million USD, compared with a loss of more than $167 million in the same period last year. Total revenue for the quarter was $732 million, a 2 per cent increase on the same period last year.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey attributed the small rise to increased advertising revenue, stemming from the myriad updates it made to its product over the last year, as well as video ad sales.

The company also announced record quarterly revenue and an increase in daily users — but total monthly active users failed to grow, staying at around 330 million.

In the U.S., Twitter actually lost a million of its monthly users, dropping from 69 million to 68 million. Fortune estimates that Twitter has roughly 125 million daily users, compared to Facebook’s 1.4 billion.

Twitter reported that it has 330 million users, which is roughly the same as the quarter before. Previously, user growth has climbed, so any user number that plateaus leaves investors nervous about the future of the company. But this past quarter was spent cleaning house, purging fake accounts, and suspending the most vicious hate-peddlers on the site, says Dorsey.

“Achieving profitability was one of the company’s main goals in 2017, and one of the big reasons it laid off 9 percent of its workforce in late 2016, and then sold off its developer business and shut down its video app Vine,” reads the report.

“I’m proud of the steady progress we made in 2017, and confident in our path ahead,” Dorsey said.

P.S. - Like our news? Support the site with a coffee/beer. Or shop with our Amazon link. We use affiliate links when possible--thank you for supporting independent media.