Twitter loses $5.6 billion in market cap in two weeks and no buyers are on the horizon

Twitter stocked dropped another 5% last Friday after news that yet another potential suitor, SalesForce.com, was not going to pursue buying the social media platform.

And it looks like there may not be other bidders on the horizon.

Salesforce had been the only serious contender left in the race after Twitter opened itself to takeover offers, two people briefed on the sale process said. However, Twitter’s advisers are still seeking other potential bidders, those people added. The sale process is virtually dead, said a person close to Twitter’s senior management. — Financial Times

Its stock has lost 33% of its value since early October and it’s been on a downward track — except for a brief flip when it appeared their might be a sale — for the past year. That equates to roughly 5.6 billion dollars in market capitalization in less than two weeks’ time.

Twitter is facing a myriad of problems.

• Stagnant user growth — just 1% in 2Q 2016.
• Revenue growth shrank for the 8th consecutive quarter
• Twitter lost $100 million in 2Q 2016 alone. That was an improvement from a loss of $136 million a year earlier.

Twitter has tried some bold moves this year, including a streaming rights deal with the NFL to broadcast some Thursday night football games. Twitter’s first NFL stream had an average audience of 243,000 viewers per minute. That compares to 15 .4 million that watched the game on CBS or the NFL Network. It’s also substantially less than the 2.3 million people per minute that watched Yahoo’s NFL game from last October, which was broadcast from London on early Sunday morning.

Twitter recently signed deals with MLB and NHL to stream some games and most recently announced a deal to stream a night of election coverage in partnership with BuzzFeed.

All of this is despite continued media coverage of Twitter and being thrust repeatedly into the national spotlight as the mechanism for many of Donald Trump’s late night missives.

Twitter users have complained constantly about it becoming a place for trolls and general nastiness. Some long-time, die-hard users have abandoned the service. People like Julieann Smolinski, who joined Twitter in 2009 and had 170,000 followers.

“Twitter Has Become a Park Filled With Bats and Perverts,” she wrote.

“I’m quitting Twitter for a specific, practical reason: Because I keep getting bothered by assholes and perverts and Twitter doesn’t seem willing or able to do anything about it. I’m quitting Twitter the way you quit your favorite restaurant when it suffers an E. coli outbreak.” — Julieann Smolinski

UPDATE: She has since rejoined Twitter, but the point remains.

Advertisers, while spending some serious dollars with Twitter in the past, are starting to re-evaluate their spending.

“We’ve had three, four, five years of advertisers working with Twitter data and the fact that they’re moving away from Twitter has to tell you something about the value of that data to an advertiser. To a tech company, that’s something different.” — Mark Mahaney, RBC Capital Markets, on CNBC.