Twitter Q4 revenue surpasses predictions, while new user count disappoints
Twitter has released its Q4 earnings report and while the popular social network’s user growth was less than pleasing to shareholders, it reported earnings exceeded the expectations of last quarter.
While Twitter reported 288 million returning users overall, it revealed that there were only four million new users since last quarter. The number of regular users still falls far behind Facebook, which has more than five times its amount.
Still, Twitter received $479m in revenue this quarter, which is a 97 per cent increase from last year’s $243m, and $24m more than the expected amount.
Twitter has come under some scrutiny after chief executive officer, Dick Costolo’s entire leadership team was replaced this past year.
Still, Costolo assured investors that recent and upcoming changes would put the company back on the track of rapid growth by creating a “compelling, valuable experience to anyone in the world, whether they have a Twitter account or not.”
Costolo said he planned to accomplish this by enhancing private messaging features, hosting a native mobile video that would allow users to edit video directly in the app.
He also hoped to make Twitter “valuable to users the moment they sign up” by making it easier for new users to find and follow others.
The company projected total earnings were between $2.3b and $2.35b for the 2015 fiscal year.
Earlier in the day, Twitter announced that it had agreed a new deal with Google that would enhance tweet searches.