Twitter posts a profit for the first time, users remain at 330m

Don’t look now, but Twitter just made money.

In its 12 year existence the microblogging social network had yet to record a green revenue figure, but this all changed drastically in the company’s latest financial report.

Its Q4 2017 highlights suggests that it made a profit of US$91-million, this coming after a loss of US$167-million in the same quarter last year.

The gains stem from “strong engagement growth, improved revenue features, improved ROI, and better sales execution,” it told investors in a report.

But that’s fluff really. Cost-cutting was the main driver of profit here. Expenses for “General and administrative, research and development, sales and marketing and cost of revenue” decreased by US$240-million in Q4 2017 over Q4 2016.

Full-year growth also shows a degree of stagnation.

Overall, revenue figures for 2017 topped US$2.443-billion dollars, down from US$2.53-billion in the previous year. Additionally, its share of revenue from advertising shrunk too, with “data licensing and other revenue” gaining around US$50-million.

Notably, daily active users have increase by 12% year-over-year too, but this hides a deeper issue: user growth.

“Average US MAUs [monthly average users] were 68-million for Q4, an increase of 2% year-over-year and a decrease of 1-million quarter-over-quarter, reflecting the impact of the change to Safari’s third-party app integration, as well as seasonality and increased information quality efforts,” the company wrote.

“Average international MAUs were 262-million for Q4, an increase of 4% year-over-year and compared to 261-million in the previous quarter.”

With that said, Twitter’s overall monthly average user numbers remained at 330-million.