11 Feb 2016

Twitter shares drop as user growth slows

3:53 pm on 11 February 2016

] Shares of Twitter have fallen in after-hours trading with the company's quarterly results showing user growth faltering.

Twitter logo

Photo: AFP / Alexandr Kryazhev / RIA Novosti

Twitter reported a net loss of $US90m for the last three months of 2015, versus a loss of $US125m a year ago.

The social media site saw its user growth stall, with 320 million average monthly active users - the same number as the previous quarter.

It was the first quarter in Twitter's history that the number of monthly active users had not grown.

Revenue for the quarter rose by 48 percent to $US710m compared with the fourth quarter of 2014, matching analysts' expectations.

Immediately after the results were announced, Twitter shares fell 10 percent in after-hours trading, before recovering to a 3 percent loss.

Investors had been anticipating the announcement of major changes to Twitter's product offerings to increase the user base.

The company had earlier announced that it would be introducing a new feature that shows the best tweets at the top of a user's feed, rather than showing tweets in reverse chronological order.

Some users felt the change would kill the social network and began to use the hash tag #RIPtwitter in protest.

The company said it was planning on improving its video offerings, building on the launch of its live video streaming product, Periscope, in March.

Twitter shares have more than halved since its chief executive Jack Dorsey - one of the site's founders - returned to Twitter in July.

The company has never reported a quarterly profit.

- BBC