Twitter released its 4th quarterly report for the business year ending 2017 and it is full of surprises.
Starting with the big one where fr the first time ever, Twitter announced that they were profitable for the first time ever. If you have been following their quarterly results for a while, the company usually turns in a loss and this has impacted its share price over time, even making it less valuable than Snap (owner of Snapchat.)
Although they were profitable, their net income was not high ($91 million). Q4 revenue was $732 million which was an increase of 2% year on year, of which advertising is still the biggest money maker ($644 million).
Twitter also said that their daily active user numbers grew 12% year on year which marked their fifth consecutive quarter in terms of double digit year on year growth. Their monthly active user base grew 4% year on year to 330 million, which is still way less than their immediate competitors.
During this time, Twitter launched features, where they expanded the tweet character limit and easier threading of tweets. The company says that the increased character count has led to more engagements and spend more time on the network. The addition of threading tweets in a simple way has apparently led to hundreds of thousands of threads being tweeted every day.
The news that Twitter was profitable was so good, the stock market responded and Twitter’s shares surged and was worth more than Snap after a while. Currently it is up 13% and if they turn in a profit next quarter, rest assured that it will continue rising.
