By Barry Eitel
SAN FRANCISCO
Twitter released its fourth quarter 2014 earnings report Thursday that showed it pulled in $479 million last quarter compared to investor expectations of $453 million.
The rate of Twitter’s user growth, however, worried Wall Street as evidence of investors’ conflicted feelings regarding the earnings was reflected in after-hours trading.
Shares of Twitter skittered between dropping as much as 6 percent to leaping to as high as 12 percent in the period after the report was released.
Wall Street expected Twitter’s monthly active user count to climb to 295 million. In reality, CEO Dick Costolo claimed that the network is now home to 288 million – an increase of only 4 million from last quarter.
In comparison, Facebook said it ended 2014 with a vast population of 1.39 billion monthly active users. Instagram, owned by Facebook, even announced last year it had more than 300 million monthly active users—and defused the myth that Facebook and Twitter are battling for social media dominance. Turns out it’s Facebook and Facebook.
The company’s fourth quarter user growth is the smallest quarterly gain in its history, which went public in November of 2013. Still, the site is home to 20 percent more users than a year ago.
As user counts continue to trail far behind Facebook, Costolo is facing increasing heat from investors. However, revenue for all of last year hit $1.4 billion, a 111 percent increase from 2013.
In a conference call Thursday, Costolo discussed different areas of expansion, including private direct messaging for groups and a focus on video streaming service Vine, purchased by Twitter in 2012 and now experiencing 1.5 billion video loops per day.
Twitter stock has risen steadily in January, following news of several new products and partners, including a deal with Google to make tweets more searchable.
