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.
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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.
