Twitter misses estimates with Q4 revenue of $717 million

Jos

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Twitter reported its fourth-quarter results today and failed to impress investors as revenue growth nearly slowed to a halt. Specifically, the company posted sales of $717 million, up 1% from a year ago, and a net loss of $167.1 million versus a net loss of $90.2 million in the year-earlier period.

The widening loss is due to a $101.2 million restructuring charge for Q4 2016 after the company cut 9% of its workforce — about 350 employees. On the other hand Twitter is struggling to compete for ad dollars with rivals like Facebook which currently monetizes users at about twice the rate.

One bright spot, at least according to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, is the service’s overall user growth. The number of daily active users was up 11% year-over-year, the third straight quarter the metric has improved, but ultimately at 319 million monthly active users it was a gain of just two million from the previous quarter.

"The whole world is watching Twitter," Jack Dorsey, Twitter's cofounder and CEO, said on a conference call with analysts. "While we may not be currently meeting everyone's growth expectations, there is one thing that continues to grow and outpace our peers: Twitter's influence and impact."

Indeed Twitter is at its best when it comes to real-time political, sporting, entertainment and other current events. But the service struggles with making its product simpler and friendlier to reach a mass audience. One sticking point has also been Twitter's inability to curb abuse on its platform, which is something the company is beginning to take stronger steps against to address the problem.

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Maybe twittering is about to run its course...hope so.
I think it is part of the problem with society and the "instant" access crap.
Just take the Ferguson "hands up don't shoot/Black Lives Matter" nonsense.
Someone tweets out, a white police officer shot an unarmed black teenager
in the back, with his hands up, running away. Retweeted and retweeted and
the entire nation blows up, they burn the town down. Then, come to find out
it was ALL A LIE. He was running TOWARD the officer in a threatening manor,
had assaulted the officer, tried to take his duty weapon away, assaulted a
convenience store clerk, had stolen some things from the store and on and on.
But, by the time the truth comes out, you think anyone in the BLM realm believes
it?
People for whatever reason believe twitter/Facebook et al, like it was gospel without
checking first. Maybe common sense will prevail and twitter will go away.
 
I get an instinctual if a little guilty smile imagining the reactions of -many(countless)- people to Twitter actually doing an Enron-type debt implosion (clearly, I don't tweet and don't 'get it').
It definitely wouldn't be pretty.
 
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