Twitter continues to lose users - yet strong business growth
Twitter continues to lose users due to its crackdown on hate speech, spam, and fake accounts. Nevertheless, its third-quarter performance was significantly better than expected.
Compared to the previous quarter, the number of monthly active users worldwide fell by 9 million to 326 million, as Twitter announced on Thursday. CEO Jack Dorsey cited the ongoing efforts to rid the platform of fake and dubious profiles that spread hate messages and political propaganda as the reason for the second consecutive decline. Although these clean-up efforts depressed the number of registered accounts, revenue in the three months to the end of September climbed 29 percent year-on-year to 758 million dollars thanks to strong advertising business.
Thanks to a tax credit of 683 million dollars, Twitter even made a surprising profit of 789 million dollars. In the same period of the previous year, there was still a loss of 21 million dollars. The quarterly figures clearly exceeded Wall Street's expectations. This was very well received by investors - the share price initially rose by around ten percent in pre-market trading. (SDA)
