Twitter Posts First Profitable Quarter Ever, but Loses Active Users in America

Twitter has posted their first profitable quarter in 12 years, but the company is still lagging behind in monthly user metrics.

The Verge reports that Twitter has finally posted a profitable quarter after operating at a loss for almost 12 years. Twitter posted a profit of $91 million in the fourth quarter of 2017, a massive increase on the $167 million loss the company posted a year previously in the fourth quarter of 2016. The company told investors last year that they expected their first profitable quarter soon due to cost-cutting measures implemented by the company. Twitter also saw a two percent rise in their revenue this quarter, up to $732 million in comparison with last year’s $717 million.

However, not all of Twitter’s latest metrics are positive. The company has a growing issue on its hands — specifically in active monthly users. While the company’s monthly users grew by approximately 4 percent each year, that growth was stalled every quarter settling at a number around 330 million. Even more worrying for Twitter, the number of active monthly U.S. users has actually shrunk from 69 million to 68 million. This is the second time in one year that the number of active U.S. users has dropped. It seems that Twitter’s growth internationally has been slow but steady but the company is failing to convince their American users to stick with the platform.

Twitter has laid some of the blame for their slow user growth on Apple’s doorstep, pointing to a change in Safari’s third-party app integrations. Twitter stated that they lost approximately two million monthly users as a result of the change, one million of these users were US based. The company does believe that their change in the length of Tweets that users can post has been a positive though, stating that it’s responsible for users spending more time on the platform and returning to it at higher rates.

Despite their profitable quarter, Twitter continues to lag behind their social media competitors such as Facebook and Instagram. Facebook boasts a whopping 2.2 billion active monthly users while Instagram has approximately 800 million monthly users. However, it is likely that Twitter’s latest earnings report will take some pressure off CEO Jack Dorsey despite the company’s continued failure to convince people to use the platform.