‘Twitter’ has recently announced their first quarterly earnings and it looks like they are having a rough afternoon. Twitter is still growing but apparently not that fast. While they’ve got plenty of positive things to say, and the upside is huge, the social service once again lost money.
For Q1 2015, Twitter reports they had a net loss of $162 million, but revenue of $436 million, up 74% year-over-year. A positive rise, but ultimately short of their $440-450 million estimate. Profit in the first quarter was 7 cents a share. Analysts had estimated 5 cents a share. For the current quarter, Twitter projects revenue between $470 million to $485 million. Analysts had estimated sales of $537.3 million. The shares fell more than 18 percent on Tuesday on the early news that it had lowered its full-year 2015 financial expectations.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo says, “Revenue growth fell slightly short of our expectations due to lower-than-expected contribution from some of our newer direct response products. It is still early days for these products, and we have a strong pipeline that we believe will drive increased value for direct response advertisers in the future”
Twitter said that it now has 302 million monthly active users, meeting analysts’ estimates, up from 288 million users at the end of the previous quarter. Twitter is working to find new ways to reach casual users while encouraging existing users to spend more time on the site or in the app.
“We remain confident in our strategy and in Twitter’s long-term opportunity, and our focus remains on creating sustainable shareholder value by executing against our three priorities: strengthening the core, reducing barriers to consumption and delivering new apps and services,”