Twitter’s Monthly User Growth Stalls, Ad Revenue Climbs
Twitter can’t catch a break. After several quarters of audience struggles, in the fourth quarter of 2015 the company tried two big things to get more people to use its social network. It introduced a new feature, Moments, to make it easier for casual users to check out what’s going on in the world. And it launched its first integrated marketing campaign — including a TV ad — to promote Moments and get more people to use Twitter. But neither was enough to offset the number of people who stopped using Twitter.
The fourth quarter “historically has been our seasonally worst quarter, and this Q4 was no exception to that,” said Twitter CFO Anthony Noto during the company’s earnings call on Wednesday. Twitter’s execs chalked up that fourth-quarter weakness to the fact that there are fewer big events that lead people to go on Twitter, even though the fourth quarter was home to the World Series, the fall TV season and holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year’s Eve (including the College Football Playoff semi-finals).
In the fourth quarter of 2015, Twitter attracted 320 million people to check out its service each month on average. Even though that’s about one-fifth of Facebook’s monthly audience size, it’s still a lot of people, 9% more than had checked out Twitter each month in the fourth quarter of 2014. Problem is, 320 million monthly active users is the same amount of people that checked out Twitter each month during the previous quarter. That is to say, the size of Twitter’s audience didn’t grow in the fourth quarter.
