No new users in Q2, Twitter shares tank

Twitter has added zero users since first quarter, posting $574 million in revenue in the second quarter this year which is a decrease of five per cent YoY (year-on-year).

Twitter now has 328 million monthly active users (MAUs) -- the same number it reported in the first quarter of 2017.

On the contrary, Facebook has over two billion users, WhatsApp now reports over one billion daily users and Instagram 'Stories' has over 250 million users.

The not-so-good results brought Twitter's stock down almost 12 per cent in trading on Thursday.

"Monthly active usage (MAU) increased five per cent YoY and daily active usage (DAU) increased 12 per cent YoY, marking the third consecutive quarter of double-digit growth," said Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO, in a statement.

Last quarter, the micro-blogging platform had daily active usage growth of 14 per cent YoY.

Twitter's net income in the second quarter was $56 million, or eight cents per share.

"We're strengthening our execution, which gives us confidence that our product improvements will continue to contribute to meaningful increases in daily active usage," Dorsey added.

"We continue to invest in revenue products and services that leverage Twitter's unique value proposition and are delivering more value to advertisers than ever, with double-digit growth in daily active usage, improvements in ad relevance and better pricing," added Anthony Noto, Twitter's COO.

Twitter was now more focused towards video streaming on its platform.

"We're proud of our strong growth in video, which remained our largest and fastest growing ad format, and we received a positive response from advertisers around the live premium video content debuted at Twitter's Digital Content NewFronts," Noto said.

Despite stalled user growth, Twitter was now exploring new revenue streams and ways of innovation.

When it comes to "Promoted" tweets, the number of brands using Twitter for advertising has been on the rise.

Globally, in the first quarter of 2017, Twitter streamed more than 800 hours of live premium video from content partners across over 450 events, reaching 45 million unique viewers -- an increase of 31 per cent from the fourth quarter of 2016.

--IANS

na/in