Twitter suffers slowdown in user growth
GROWTH in Twitter’s user numbers slowed in 2014, increasing by 20 per cent on 2013, to 288m, although the company’s financials took an impressive upward turn.
Users jumped by 30 per cent between 2012 and 2013, and in 2012 the social media site reported user growth of 59 per cent.
On a quarterly basis, the number of monthly active users went up by just two per cent between the third and last quarters of 2014, whereas growth increased by five per cent between the second and third quarters, and six per cent between the first and second.
The company stated that the 20 per cent year-over-year growth reflects a loss of approximately 4m net monthly active users in the fourth quarter of 2014, and attributed the loss to “changes in third party integrations”.
Growth in timeline views was also impacted, at 17 per cent for the year, against a 55 per cent increase in the number of views in 2013.
Dick Costolo, Twitter chief executive, said that the trend “thus far” in the first quarter of 2015 led the firm to believe that the absolute number of net users added in the quarter “will be similar to what we saw during the first three quarters of 2014”.
Meanwhile, revenue for the final quarter of 2014 was up 97 per cent compared with the last three months of 2013, going from $243m (£159m) to $479m, while revenue for the full year more than doubled, from $665m to $1.4bn.
Costolo commented: “We closed out the year with our business advancing at a great pace.”
For the first quarter of 2015, Twitter is predicting revenue of between $440m and $450m, while full year revenue is projected to be in the range of $2.3bn to $2.35bn.