Twitter beats expectations: it’s the Second Life ?

Twitter has announced Q1 2019 revenues of $787 million — a year-on-year (YoY) increase of around 20%. However, after the company reported a record $909 million income for the last quarter, this represents a quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) decrease of roughly 14%.

Twitter did caution shareholders during its previous earnings call that it expected revenues to drop to between $715 million and $775 million, and Wall Street analysts had recently estimated that Twitter would hit $774 million. In short, Twitter beat expectations comfortably.

The perennial sticking point for Twitter is, of course, user growth. With that in mind, the San Francisco-based social network reported that its monthly active users (MAUs) grew to 330 million, up from 321 million during the previous quarter. It’s worth noting that this is actually the last quarter Twitter will report its MAUs — during its Q4 2018 earnings in February the company announced that it would instead focus on its “monetizable daily active users (mDAUs),” which it defines as those who log in to Twitter through twitter.com or any of its various applications that are able to show advertisements.

Twitter previously revealed that mDAUs grew throughout 2018 from 120 million to 126 million, and today it reported that this figure had grown 11% YoY to 134 million. This is why Twitter has chosen to switch its user growth metric. If the MAU figure had been in constant ascent, it’s unlikely Twitter would have changed how it reports growth — but the fact is, the MAU figure fell from 336 million to 321 million over the 12-month period leading up to December 2018. Even though the MAU figure has now risen again to 330 million, it’s still down nearly 2% on the corresponding period last year, illustrating that MAUs are subject to fluctuations and that Twitter’s numbers are showing little sign of long-term growth.

The company’s shares have been a somewhat volatile asset since it went public in 2013, but its stock did recover in 2018 to hit a peak of around $47, compared to an all-time low of roughly $14 the year before. Twitter’s shares have been hovering around the $33-$35 mark in recent weeks, and in the wake of its Q1 2019 earnings its premarket price jumped by more than 8%.

Looking to the future, Twitter revealed that it expects revenues to fall to somewhere between $770 million and $830 million for the second quarter.