The pattern repeats. Once again Twitter got slammed due to slowing user growth and CEO Dick Costolo is, again, reiterating the company's strategy to stem the problem. Twitter really needs to get a handle on this problem and quick.
During the third quarter, Twitter saw its average monthly active users (MAUs) grow 23% year-to-year to 284 million, adding only 13 million since Q2. Mobile MAUs represented 80% of the company's total MAUs.
Analysts had been expecting MAUs to reach at least 287 million. Its 5% quarter-to-quarter growth was down from the 6% Twitter saw in Q2. In a recent report, MMK Partners had said that anything below 14 million net adds would be a miss.
On a conference call following the release, Costolo outlined the initiatives that Twitter has been putting in place in recent quarters, how he sees it playing out and saying that he knows that time is of the essence.
"You should think about the size of our total audience as a series of geometrically eccentric circles," he said. "At the core, you have our monthly active users. They are our most engaged users, contributing and consuming, the vast amount of great content on Twitter. Those contributions are the fuel that powers the entire system."
The next level is what Costolo calls the "logged-out audience," or "hundreds of millions of user who that come to Twitter every month but don't log in." The size of this audience is at least double the size of the core audience, he said.
Third and final circle are those who are reached through syndication and embedded tweets and timelines, across the Web and mobile.
"We think about everything we do in the context of this set of geometrically eccentric circles and think it's useful for you to as well."
Twitter, said Costolo, has three main objectives it wants to accomplish:
1. Strengthen the core: "We have to continue to grow our monthly active users and make Twitter an increasingly daily use case for them."
It will do this by improving the new user experience, which it did by overhauling the sign-in process; providing rich media creation and consumption tools; and adding functionality to its direct messaging service.
2. Reduce barriers to consumption - "We will continue to innovation on better ways to organize our content, to deliver the right experiences at the right time, for all types of users: logged-in, logged-out and on syndicated partner properties."
3. Building new applications and services - "Our announcement of Fabric a week ago at our development conference is the most recent initiative in this area and components of Fabric are already in use by tens of thousands of developers around the world, collectively reaching well over one billion iOS and Android users.
"We believe that Fabric can be the one SDK that any global app developer needs to embed in their application."
While Costolo says that he is "happy with the strategy and the quality of the work we're doing," he also said that, given the company's "significant aspirations," as well the opportunity in front of it, Twitter will have to increase the pace of execution.
Considering that slowing user numbers are becoming a really big, long-term issue for Twitter, picking up the pace on monetizing those other types of users need to happen ASAP.
Q3 results
Timeline views reached 181 billion for the third quarter of 2014, an increase of 14% year-over-year. The 5% quarter to quarter increase may have also hurt Twitter, as it had seen a 10% increase in the second quarter, though those numbers may have been inflated due to the World Cup.
Once again, almost all of Twitter's revenue came from advertising, which accounted for $320 million, a 109% year to year increase. Mobile advertising revenue was 85% of total advertising revenue. Advertising revenue per thousand timeline views reached $1.77 in the third quarter of 2014, an increase of 83% year-over-year.
Data licensing, and other revenue, came to $41 million, an increase of 171% year-over-year. Of Twitter's total revenue, $121 million, or 34%, was international, an increase of 176% year-over-year.
GAAP net loss was $175 million for the quarter, compared to a net loss of $65 million in the same period last year.
Twitter is projecting revenue of between $440 and $450 million, with adjusted EBITDA in the range of $100 million to $105 million, for the next quarter. For the full year 2014, it expects to see revenue between $1.365 billion to $ 1.375 billion, with an adjusted EBITDA in the range of $260 million to $265 million.
Last quarter the company had projected revenue of between $330 and $340 million for Q3, and revenue between $1.310 billion to $1.330 billion for the full year.
(Image source: mashable.com)
The report outlined four areas as a guide to help startups to sell into these systems
Read more...
Steven Loeb
Flyte delivers mechanotherapy transvaginally to the pelvic floor
Read more...
Steven Loeb
The country will need an additional 203,200 RNs each year until 2031 to fill staffing shortages
Read more...
Steven Loeb
Startup/Business
Joined Vator on
Twitter is an online information network that allows anyone with an account to post 140 character messages, called tweets. It is free to sign up. Users then follow other accounts which they are interested in, and view the tweets of everyone they follow in their "timeline." Most Twitter accounts are public, where one does not need to approve a request to follow, or need to follow back. This makes Twitter a powerful "one to many" broadcast platform where individuals, companies or organizations can reach millions of followers with a single message. Twitter is accessible from Twitter.com, our mobile website, SMS, our mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, our iPad application, or 3rd party clients built by outside developers using our API. Twitter accounts can also be private, where the owner must approve follower requests.
Twitter started as an internal project within the podcasting company Odeo. Jack Dorsey, and engineer, had long been interested in status updates. Jack developed the idea, along with Biz Stone, and the first prototype was built in two weeks in March 2006 and launched publicly in August of 2006. The service grew popular very quickly and it soon made sense for Twitter to move outside of Odea. In May 2007, Twitter Inc was founded.
Our engineering team works with a web application framework called Ruby on Rails. We all work on Apple computers except for testing purposes.
We built Twitter using Ruby on Rails because it allows us to work quickly and easily--our team likes to deploy features and changes multiple times per day. Rails provides skeleton code frameworks so we don't have to re-invent the wheel every time we want to add something simple like a sign in form or a picture upload feature.
There are a few ways that Twitter makes money. We have licensing deals in place with Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft's Bing to give them access to the "firehose" - a stream of tweets so that they can more easily incorporate those tweets into their search results.
In Summer 2010, we launched our Promoted Tweets product. Promoted Tweets are a special kind of tweet which appear at the top of search results within Twitter.com, if a company has bid on that keyword. Unlike search results in search engines, Promoted Tweets are normal tweets from a business, so they are as interactive as any other tweet - you can @reply, favorite or retweet a Promoted Tweet.
At the same time, we launched Promoted Trends, where companies can place a trend (clearly marked Promoted) within Twitter's Trending Topics. These are especially effective for upcoming launches, like a movie or album release.
Lastly, we started a Twitter account called @earlybird where we partner with other companies to provide users with a special, short-term deal. For example, we partnered with Virgin America for a special day of fares on Virginamerica.com that were only accessible through the link in the @earlybird tweet.
What's next for Twitter?
We continue to focus on building a product that provides value for users.
We're building Twitter, Inc into a successful, revenue-generating company that attracts world-class talent with an inspiring culture and attitude towards doing business.
Joined Vator on
