Twitter announced its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2018 today, and it marks the first quarter where the company will be giving numbers for its Daily Active Users. Previously it had only given out the monthly active user numbers.
As far as monthly active users, Twitter did post a decrease of about five million to 321 million. That is the lowest number Twitter has had in nearly two years. And that is likely why Twitter is looking to release its daily active user numbers instead. Something that analysts and investors have been pushing Twitter to do for quite some time.
The daily active users number is a bit better, but it's just 126 million. That's a pretty small number compared to Facebook, Twitter's main competitor. This is, however, up from about 115 million daily active users a year ago. Which makes the number look a bit better than the monthly active users.
126 million daily active users is no small number, but it is small compared to other competitors. Snapchat announced 186 million daily active users last week. While Instagram crossed 500 million over a year ago. Putting Twitter firmly in last place, when it comes to daily active users.
Now, a big reason for Twitter seeing less daily active users than other companies is likely from the company purging a number of bot accounts. A number of bot accounts and those that were just trolls, have been purged lately. As Twitter is looking to clean up its social network. Something that was desperately needed to be done. Of course, this isn't new, Twitter started doing this last summer, so it doesn't have as big of an impact as in recent quarters.
As far as the actual money, for the quarter. Twitter raked in $909 million in revenue. About $791 million was due to ads, while the rest was from licensing. That $909 million is up from $732 million a year ago. Advertising also jumped from $644 million to $791 million in that same amount of time. GAAP Net Income is at $255 million, up from around $91 million a year ago. Adjusted EBITDA was $397 million for the quarter, compared to $308 in the same period a year ago.
Twitter's numbers here did not go over well, even though it did beat analysts expectations. Investors were clearly hoping for more from the company, as shares of Twitter are down a whopping 10-percent today. That is not quite as bad as it was after the previous quarter's earnings call, where it dropped close to 20-percent (thanks to some help from Facebook).
The big issue that Twitter is facing, and likely the reason why investors are selling their stock today, is that it has not grown in the US for a number of years now. Of the 126 million daily active users, only about 27 million are in the US. The rest are from other countries that Twitter is available in (read: not China). And it actually dropped in the US, when looking at its monthly active user numbers. This is a real problem for Twitter. If it can't grow in the US, it's going to have a pretty big issue on its hands. With there being over 300 million people in the US, and only about 27 million using Twitter daily, there's a lot of room to grow.