Twitter just reported its latest financial results and it had good news to share, as it saw its first profitable quarter in more than a decade.
The micro-blogging social network has been around for 12 years and it has been a public company for four years, yet, in all this time, it never had a profitable quarter until now.
Twitter Reports First-Ever Profitable Quarter
If so far Twitter has been incurring losses or trying to maintain a flat line, in the fourth quarter of 2017, it managed to make $91 million. By comparison, during the first quarter of 2016, the company posted a loss of $167 million.
Nevertheless, Twitter remained confident that it will eventually achieve profitability. In late 2017, it even told investors that various measures such as cutting costs and more were paying off, and it was close to having its first profitable quarter.
The company's latest financial results prove that it was right about the profitable quarter, and its revenue also climbed 2 percent to $732 million compared to the $717 million during the same period the previous year. The other three quarters of 2017 were not as good as Twitter saw revenue drops between 4 and 8 percent compared to the same periods the previous year.
Twitter Still Losing Users
While the profit and revenue aspects are looking up, it's not all good news. Twitter is still losing customers, especially in the United States. The company did see a 4 percent increase in monthly users year-over-year, but its quarter-over-quarter results were not as impressive and it saw a total of 220 million users.
Moreover, Twitter keeps bleeding users in the United States, dropping to 58 million from the previous 69 million. This marks the second decline in its U.S. user base in just one year, which might be troublesome news.
This decline indicates that Twitter not only fails to attract new users, but it didn't even manage to keep the ones that were already on the network. It made various efforts to clean up its platform, add new features, and enhance the overall experience, but that doesn't seem to be enough.
Twitter, on its part, attributes this decline to some sort of change in how Apple's Safari browser handles third-party app integrations, which cost the social network roughly two million monthly users. On the other hand, upping the character limit from 140 to 280 did help Twitter's case as people used the platform more. Overall, Twitter says that 2017 has been a good year and it made notable headway.
"#TWTR made significant operational and financial progress in 2017, delivering sustained growth in audience and engagement and improved financial performance throughout the year," says the company.
