We’re still getting quarterly earnings for the final quarter of 2015. On Wednesday, Twitter announced their Q4 2015 earnings, and while the financials were pretty good, their growth rate hit a wall. In Q3 of 2015, the company announced that they had 320 million monthly active users. In Q4 of 2015, the company also announced that they had 320 million monthly active users. Analysts were expecting the social media platform to announce around 325 million monthly active users, but that hasn’t happened. The good news is that while they didn’t add any more users, they also didn’t lose anymore. Twitter also announced that they saw a decline in monthly active users in the fourth quarter, when compared to the third quarter. However they have said that the active user number for January has jumped back to where it was in the third quarter. Of those 320 million monthly active users, 80% of them were using the site from mobile apps, or the mobile site.
On the financial side, Twitter brought in $710 million in revenues for the quarter, bringing the year total to $2.2 billion. That’s a 48% and 58% increase year-over-year respectively. Advertising revenue for the quarter accounted for $641 million of that $710 million the company brought in. That’s a 48% increase year-over-year as well. While $70 million came from data licensing and other revenue. For the US, $463 million of that revenue was generated. Twitter’s biggest source of revenue, as you can see above, is from advertising. Which the company announced they had 130,000 active advertisers in the fourth quarter, that’s nearly a 90% increase over the same period last year.
Twitter also mentioned in their report, that 2015 was a pretty big year for them. By introducing new features as well as starting up new partnerships. In 2015, Twitter brought video to their platform, after being in beta for select users before that. Between December 2014 and December 2015, they saw a 220-times increase in video views. They also mentioned that the first full trailer for ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ debuted on Twitter. Periscope also launched in 2015, which has quickly become a pretty popular live-streaming app. Twitter also expanded direct messages to up to people, and the character limit was increased from 140 to 10,000. The company stated that DM usage rose 61% compared to the year before. The company also debuted Moments, as well as the “While You Were Away” and over 20 other features and updates. Many of which were for developers. Twitter also got an agreement with Google for Tweets to appear in the search results.
Twitter’s user growth may have plateaued in the fourth quarter, but they have seen increases in every other part of their business. They’ll likely see user growth start to increase again in the first quarter of this year. 320 million monthly active users is no small number, but they still have plenty of room to grow.