Twitter posts profits for the first time, but still can’t grow user base

Twitter has been struggling for quite some time now to not only turn a profit but to also grow its user base. There is now some good news, though. It appears that Twitter managed to turn its first ever quarterly profit of $91 million. There’s some level of optimism now for the social media company because it’s in fact now making money.

Despite making a profit, there’s a grey cloud over the company. Previously in the second quarter, the company claimed that it had lose around a million users from its platform. As it turned out, they miscalculated and the figure of user loss was a lot worse. Three months later, the company had rebounded its user base to 330 million monthly active users. In the fourth quarter, the numbers held fairly steady. Despite Twitter keeping its figure steady, it’s not comfortable knowing that it’s not experiencing growth.

Twitter has blamed the fall in its numbers on two things: the project that’s euphemistically-titled “information quality efforts,” and a change to Safari’s app integrations. The apparent project is attempting to purge the site of automated accounts that are designed to spread “malicious activity.” CEO Jack Dorsey had pledged that the company will continue to crack down on automated accounts and otherwise “poor-quality usage.”

Everything isn’t terrible for Twitter. The upside is the daily active user figures have increased by 12 percent year-on-year, so the people who use Twitter are now using it more often. The 280 character limit increase that Twitter enacted may have had something to do with users coming back to the platform more often and being more active. Twitter also believes that the fairly-new abilities to thread tweets has made its users quite happy.

Twitter has seen its revenue rise internationally as the company sees a small decline in money domestically. In the US where there are 68 million users, advertising revenue has fallen 8 percent year-on-year to $406 million. Speaking in terms of international where there are 262 million users, ad sales have increased 17 percent to $326 million.

Originally published at The Jolt Journal.