Twitter Stock Pre-market 36.70 +2.31 (6.72%)
The company said the number of daily users rose 11% to 134 million for the first quarter of 2019, thanks to both “organic growth as well as ongoing product improvements and marketing.” Compare that to the 1.5 billion daily users that Facebook has. But if you compare twitter numbers to Amazon or Walmart the twitter numbers are good and their ability to monetize those numbers are good.
Twitter is planning on replacing monthly user numbers with daily user numbers which is the number of users who actually view advertisements on twitter each day.
Does this 11% increase in users indicate that the twitter purge of users is coming to an end? My account indicates that the purge is still ongoing but it may be slowing. I am not sure.
The company posted profit of $190.8 million, or 25 cents per share, for the first quarter. After adjusting for one-time gains and costs, earnings came to 9 cents per share, short of Wall Street expectations. Analysts surveyed by Zacks Investment Research forecast earnings of 15 cents per share.
Revenue came in at $786.9 million in the period, slightly beating analyst forecasts of $774.9 million.
The twitter story and the story of other internet companies is basically the story of people who can longer get organic traffic to their websites, to their apps, to their eBooks, to the products they are trying to sell. They have to advertise to be seen online. That helps companies that are good at running ads.
Even twitter hints that part of their growth came from more effective marketing and was not strictly organic. For people like me the need to run ads is the primary internet story right, and to be honest, I don’t like. 🙂 I stopped running ads in 2008 and I really do not want to start back doing it because I am so out of practice but I know what I need to do. I just do not want to do it.
Notes:
Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and launched in July of that year. The service rapidly gained worldwide popularity. In 2012, more than 100 million users posted 340 million tweets a day, and the service handled an average of 1.6 billion search queries per day. In 2013, it was one of the ten most-visited websites and has been described as “the SMS of the Internet”. As of 2018, Twitter had more than 321 million monthly active users.
Twitter ranks around 10 or 11 in traffic compared to other websites. It has held that position for a couple of years or more. It should be noted that yahoo still gets more traffic than twitter. One of the twitter’s metrics is that people spend only around 6 minutes per day on twitter. I would think the average twitter user spends more time on twitter than that but I don’t know.