Twitter revenue beats analysts’ projections, but user numbers fall short

Twitter yesterday reported revenue at $479 million in the fourth quarter, up 97 per cent as against $243 million a year ago and beating analysts' expectations of $453 million.

According to Twitter, it had 288 million regular users on its platform, an addition of only 4 million people from the previous quarter and roughly one-fifth the number of visitors to Facebook on a monthly basis. The shortfall from analysts' expectations of about 291 million regular users was significant.

In the corresponding previous year quarter, Twitter reported a loss of $125 million, or 20 cents a share, up from a loss of $500 million, or $1.41 a share, in the fourth quarter a year earlier.

However, using a measure of income that excluded stock-based compensation and other expenses, the company reported a profit of $79 million, or 12 cents a share, in the quarter, as against a profit of $10 million a year before.

Since its initial public offering in 2013, Twitter has been defending its position against shareholders expecting blockbuster quarterly results like those of the far larger social media service Facebook, The Boston Globe reported.

Critics had panned the company's slowing user growth even as the micro-blogging network went through the process of hiring and firing of top managers.

Recently, investors had started questioning if Twitter's chief executive Dick Costolo was the right man for the job.

Also, commentators say, 2015 was not looking that good either.

Meanwhile, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo had taken personal responsibility for his platform's chronic problems with harassment and abuse, and told employees that he was embarrassed for the company's failures and would soon be taking stronger action to eliminate trolls, The Verge reported.

He added problems with trolls were driving away the company's users. "We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we've sucked at it for years," Costolo wrote in an internal memo obtained by The Verge.

"It's no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day."

"It's nobody's fault but mine."

Costolo's was responding to a question on an internal forum about a recent story by Lindy West, a frequent target of harassment on Twitter.