News broke Wednesday morning that Twitter had its first profitable quarter ever. Its stock rose upwards of 20% before the market opened Thursday. Twitter’s earnings came in at $91 million during its final quarter of 2017. To put this in perspective, the final quarter of Twitter’s 2016 closed at negative $167 million. While surprising to many, there were reports that Twitter was poised to turn a profit.
Twitter’s revenue is also up, coming in at $732 million— blowing away Wall Street’s prediction of $686.4 million,a 2% bump from 2016 in “year over year growth.”
It’s difficult to say exactly what’s responsible for their success. 2017 was the year Twitter doubled its character limit from 140 to 280, they took measures tocounter abuse, and the president of the United States uses it has one of his primary modes of communication with the public.
It wasn’t all good news for Twitter though, as their monthly active user growth has stagnated in the last four quarters, hovering at 330 million. They did soften the blow by saying that daily active user growth is up by 12% but wouldn’t reveal the totals much to the dismay of analysts and shareholders since percentages without numbers backing them up are meaningless.
