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| The Telegraph |
Yesterday morning, Twitter's share value jumped by 8.3%, after going up by 14% in pre-market trading. Interestingly
enough, this comes directly following their announcement that their
first quarter earnings were actually lower than last year's, dropping
from $595 million to $548 million. That's not great, but $548 million is
still higher than a lot of the earlier estimated, which is probably
part of the reason why their stock value is going up.
Alongside this, their monthly active user count has actually risen by
around 6%, part of the largest quarterly increase in user growth rate
in more than two years - 9 million users in three months. While the revenue and advertising figures aren't great, the rise in user registration and engagement is very encouraging - it shows that Twitter are not only succeeding in keeping the platform relevant, they're excelling at it.
Twitter themselves have taken a more modest view. According to them, the
main reason why more users are getting involved is because there's been
more to talk about in the news. As far as the revenue goes, they
(Dorsey in particular) claim that a lot of the developments being
made in the next year will serve to pick up business and allow
advertisers more creative freedom on the platform.
If Twitter stay on track, they'll be profitable by the end of the
year, but they've already had to do some fairly major restructuring to
stay on target. While doing that, they've also been developing new
ways to take advantage of live streaming and other video formats, and
focused more time and energy on retaining their crown as the best source
for news, current events discussion and, in particular, customer
service.
At the moment, Twitter are only holding 1% of the digital market,
compared to Facebook's 31.7%, It's not a fight they can win, but they're
on track to start doing better. What Twitter are doing well is
finding niches in advertising which are better suited to their platform
and taking advantage of them. By the time the first quarterly earnings report rolls around again in 2018, we could be looking at a very different Twitter.
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