Twitter chief executive officer Dick Costolo has revamped the social network this year to draw in new users, but the renovations do not seem to be bringing in enough newcomers.
Twitter reported on Monday that the number of monthly Twitter users grew to 284 million in the third quarter, up 4.8 percent from the 271 million recorded in the second quarter. However, the social network attracted fewer new users than it did in the first or second quarters.
Use of the service by existing subsribers has also stalled. On average, regular subscribers pulled up their Twitter feeds slightly less frequently than during the previous quarter.
The company disclosed that in its top 20 markets, fewer than half of Twitter’s monthly visitors check the service daily — a statistic that is roughly unchanged from a year ago, when Twitter filed its paperwork to sell stock to public investors.
That suggests that recent changes made to the service, including an overhaul of the new user experience that was rolled out this year, have yet to produce great benefits for the company.
Twitter’s stock plunged about 10 percent immediately in after-hours trading in the minutes after the results came out.
In regular trading earlier in the day, shares fell 2.8 percent, to close at US$48.56.
Twitter also raised its financial projections for the fourth quarter, projecting revenue in the range of US$440 million to US$450 million and adjusted profits of US$100 million to US$105 million.
“I’m confident in our ability to build the largest daily audience in the world over time, by strengthening the core, reducing barriers to consumption and building new apps and services,” Costolo said in a statement.
Twitter’s revenue, most of which comes from advertising, increased sharply in the third quarter.
Revenue more than doubled to US$361.3 million, compared with US$168.6 million posted a year ago, exceeding Wall Street’s projection of US$352 million.
The company said it collected US$1.77 in advertising revenue per 1,000 users, its highest level ever and up 83 percent from last year’s third quarter.
Twitter recently expanded its options for marketers to buy video advertising and advertising inside other companies’ mobile applications.
The social network is still losing money as it spends hundreds of millions of dollars on stock compensation for its rapidly growing employment base.
In the third quarter, its net loss was US$175.5 million, or US$0.29 per share, compared with a loss of US$64.6 million, or US$0.48 per share in the same period a year earlier.
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