Twitter forecasts for weaker revenue in Q1

SANFRANSISCO: Twitter Inc. gave a lackluster first-quarter sales forecast and reported tepid user growth, suggesting changes to improve the social-media platform haven’t yet attracted a much wider audience.

Revenue will be $715 million to $775 million in the period, the San Francisco-based company said on Thursday in a statement. Analysts, on average, projected $766.1 million, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The shares slid about 7% in early trading.

Twitter has been ramping up efforts to reduce abuse on its platform and root out fake accounts and election malfeasance, issues that have crimped user growth in a competitive digital-advertising market. The company’s share of the lucrative market is expected to decline this year as rivals like Facebook Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google boost their dominance, according to Emarketer.

Daily users rose 9% in the fourth quarter to 126 million, a number Twitter is reporting for the first time. The growth rate was also 9% in the third quarter and had jumped 12% in the fourth quarter of 2017, the company said.

Monthly active users averaged 321 million, decreasing by 9 million from the same period a year earlier and down 5 million from the third quarter. Twitter told investors last quarter that the metric would likely continue to drop as the company cleans up the platform to remove spam and suspicious accounts. The company said it would no longer report the number of monthly active users after the first quarter.