Twitter user growth slows as new products fail to excite

Twitter Inc's slowing user growth pushed the stock to the lowest since last year's market debut.

The company said on Tuesday that membership in the first quarter reached 255 million, with year-over-year growth decelerating to 25 per cent from 30 per cent in the previous period. The stock plunged as much as 14 per cent in early trading even as sales more than doubled to $250 million, topping analysts' 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 application are gaining popularity. The company needs more consumers adopting the service and staying on longer as it vies for marketing dollars in Web and mobile advertising.

Twitter fell as low as $36.56, the lowest since November 6, the day it started trading, and was down 12 per cent to $37.34 as of 7:40 am New York time.

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.

Even as user growth slowed, people viewed their Twitter timelines more often, with 157 billion views, up 15 per cent from a year earlier.

Mobile advertising revenue accounted for 80 per cent of total ad sales, Twitter said.