Twitter lags rivals in daily users

Twitter on Thursday for the first time disclosed the number of users who compose and read tweets on the site each day.

In its earnings report released Thursday morning, Twitter said it has 126 million daily active users, a figure that is dwarfed by Facebook’s 1.2 billion daily users and that falls short of Snapchat’s 186 million daily users.

While the new figure reveals Twitter’s lesser size in comparison with other social networks, the number of daily users continues to grow, with a 9 percent increase compared with the same period last year.

Twitter has historically disclosed the percentage growth of its daily users, but not the actual figure.

The company also posted another profitable quarter, its fifth consecutive period of profitability.

Twitter brought in $909 million in revenue for the fourth quarter, up 24 percent from a year prior, with a profit of $255 million, more than double what it made during the same period in 2017.

But for the first quarter of 2019, Twitter expects revenue to come in between $715 million and $775 million, an outlook that may have unsettled investors, along with the change in disclosures about user numbers. Twitter stock was down more than 10 percent in midday trading.

In a call with investors Thursday, CEO Jack Dorsey said this financial quarter was Twitter’s most successful ever.

Jasmine Enberg, an analyst at the research firm emarketer, said the growth in daily users means that people are still “highly engaged” on Twitter, which advertisers will take as a positive sign.

Twitter also has room to grow by converting people who use the site infrequently into daily users, she said, which would allow the company to boost its revenue without having to grow its overall user base.