Responding to efforts to cut down on fake accounts, as well as a slight drop in active users, Twitter’s stock price crumbled by just under 20% on Friday in early morning trading.
This drop occurred as Twitter beat analysts' second-quarter revenue and net income estimates -- revenue climbed 24% to $711 million, with net income at $134 million, up from $56 million.
In the second quarter, the social-media platform said it wound up losing 1 million active users to 335 million, versus the first quarter of this year (336 million). Twitter now has 267 million international users and 68 million U.S. users.
Year-over-year resulted in a different picture: Twitter was up 11% in its active user total.
The decline in users was somewhat expected. Over the last few days, executives said they would be purging around 1 million “fake” accounts, not part of its key “active-user” metric.
Twitter’s stock price was down nearly 19% on early Friday trading to $34.99.
Twitter’s advertising revenues -- accounting for 85% share of all its revenues -- grew 23% to $601 million. Data licensing and other revenue rose 29% to $109 million.
Analysts also point to Twitter’s drop as being attached to overall industry issues -- caught in a vortex of Facebook’s big 20% stock market decline the day before, which cited continued revenue growth slowdown.
While these numbers are bad for FB, I think the "street" numbers are even worse for both. Meaning, these are Wall Street numbers but the "street" numbers are the numbers are you see at the online consumer level over a long period of time are even worse. Example, I keep up closely what is happen in the way of sweepstakes on FB. I see a ton of non-Americans interested in American entry only sweeps. Particulary Chinese. These are worthless to American advertisers but they do generate numbers for FB. In short, FB and Twitter generates numbers but way to many are useless, worthless and and maybe at worse, questionable.