14 DAY TRIAL // Twitter’s earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2013 is in, helping us get the picture about the service following its November IPO.
The company’s user base has grown to 241 million monthly active users, but the growth rate has slowed down to an extent. 184 million of these people also use Twitter on mobile devices. The year over year increase in monthly users was of 30 percent, which is not spectacular per se, but it still indicates a solid growth.
Timeline views reached 148 billion in 2013’s last quarter, an increase of 26 percent year over year.
Furthermore, the company generated revenues of $242.7 million (€179.4 million) in the past quarter, $220 million (€162.6 million) coming from advertising. In a quite impressive move, Twitter announced that 75 percent of total advertising revenue came from mobile devices, whether phones or tablets.
The fact that its overall advertising revenue has grown is already great news for the company from an investor’s point of view, but the fact that it has managed to attract so much money via mobile devices is even more impressive.
Twitter also had a GAAP net loss of $511 million (€377.8 million) for the fourth quarter, considerably more than it had in the same period of the previous year.
“The company's Q4 GAAP net loss included $521 million (€385.2 million) of stock-based compensation expense, of which $406 million (€300.2 million) was for restricted stock units previously granted to employees, for which no expense had been recognized, until the effective date of our initial public offering in accordance with GAAP,” the report explains.
“Twitter finished a great year with our strongest financial quarter to date. We are the only platform that is public, real-time, conversational and widely distributed and I'm excited by the number of initiatives we have underway to further build upon the Twitter experience,” said Dick Costolo, Twitter’s chief exec.
For comparison’s sake, when Twitter filed for the IPO back in October, it had 215 million monthly active users, 100 million daily active users and registered about 500 million tweets per day.
About 6 million websites had integrated Twitter within their platforms and another 3 million applications.