Even Trump’s Spectacular Tweets Don’t Help Twitter
by Wolf Richter
WolfStreet.com
Feb 9, 2017
Not enough people can figure out why on earth they should use it
Twitter, which has been laying off people and subletting large sections of its office space in San Francisco to other companies, reported today that neither the election campaign – despite the closely followed tweet storms of presidential contenders Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and to a lesser extent Hilary Clinton and other candidates – nor the even more closely followed tweets of President Elect Trump produced visible results on its fourth-quarter revenues and earnings.
Twitter now has reported net losses – as accounted for under the required Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) – every year of its existence. Pretty soon it adds up: Over the past four years, those losses amounted to $2.2 billion.
One of its own key metrics, monthly average users (MAU), inched up 4% globally to 319 million. But in the US, where election and post-election brouhaha should have boosted the metric, it remained stubbornly flat sequentially, at 67 million and was up only 3% year-over-year.
Which was bitterly disappointing for some analysts who’d expected this election brouhaha, and particularly Trump’s spectacular tweets that reverberate around the world, to perform some miracles, if not for democracy, then at least for Twitter Inc.
The Rest…HERE
