April 29 (Bloomberg) -- Twitter said today that membership in the first quarter reached 255 million, with user growth slowing to 25 percent from 30 percent in the previous period. Cory Johnson breaks down the numbers on Bloomberg Television's 'Street Smart.' (Source: Bloomberg)
Twitter Inc. is finding it harder to lure new users as it expands beyond 140-character updates.
The company said today that membership in the first quarter reached 255 million, with user growth slowing to 25 percent from 30 percent in the previous period. The stock plunged as much as 10 percent even as sales more than doubled to $250 million, topping analyst estimates.
Twitter's efforts to move past microblogging and into image and video sharing have failed to spur a surge in users in a market where Snapchat Inc. and Facebook Inc.'s Instagram service are gaining popularity. The company needs more consumers adopting the service and staying on for longer as it vies for marketing dollars in web and mobile advertising.
'Wall Street is laser focused on that user number,' said Thomas Forte, an analyst at Telsey Advisory Group in New York. 'For Twitter to maximize its value as an investment they need to get in front of as many people as possible and do a good job of monetizing that audience.'
Twitter fell as low as $38.20 in extended trading, the lowest since the day of its market debut in November. The stock rose 5.7 percent to $42.62 at the close in New York, trimming its decline for the year to 33 percent.
Twitter's net loss widened to $132.4 million, or 23 cents a share, from $27 million, or 21 cents, a year earlier. Excluding some items, the company broke even, beating the 3-cent loss predicted by analysts.
Product Tweaks
Chief Executive Officer Dick Costolo has said he is tweaking the company's product to draw in and retain users. Twitter has tried altering its design to display images and videos more prominently and make it easier to follow public conversations. Still, the company's user base remains about one-fifth the size of Facebook's.
Twitter said this month that it hired Daniel Graf, who was a director in Google Inc.'s mapping unit, to be its new head of product, starting in June. Graf replaces Michael Sippey, who left the position in January.
The company forecast second-quarter revenue of $270 million to $280 million. Analysts on average estimated $272 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Revenue for the year will be $1.2 billion to $1.25 billion, Twitter said.
Increased Competition
Twitter has been competing with Facebook and Google in the market for mobile ad dollars. The company recently said it will offer ads that software developers can use to drive more downloads of their applications -- a product type that has helped Facebook boost mobile revenue. Using its ad network, acquired in last year's purchase of MoPub, Twitter has said it can reach more than 1 billion phones.
Mobile advertising revenue accounted for 80 percent of total advertising revenue, Twitter said. The company's share of the $31.5 billion mobile ad market is expected to rise to 2.7 percent this year from 2.4 percent in 2013, trailing Facebook's 22 percent and Google's 47 percent, according to EMarketer Inc.
Even as user growth slowed, people viewed their Twitter timelines more often, with 157 billion views, up 15 percent from a year earlier.
To contact the reporter on this story: Sarah Frier in San Francisco at sfrier1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Pui-Wing Tam at ptam13@bloomberg.net Ari Levy, Reed Stevenson
Tidak ada komentar :
Posting Komentar