Twitter announced its earnings for the final quarter of 2017, this morning, and it’s a pretty good quarter for the social media giant. Twitter had a streak of losing money every quarter, since its IPO in November 2013. Analysts expected Twitter to post earnings of 14 cents per share meanwhile, Twitter posted 19 cents per share. On revenue, analysts expected Twitter to post $686.1 million, but instead posted $732 million. It did slightly miss on monthly active users or MAU. Analysts expected 332.5 million monthly active users, but Twitter only posted 330 million monthly active users.
For Twitter, it’s monthly active users did not grow from the third quarter, but it did grow 4% from a year ago. This is a big problem for Twitter, and one that it has had for a couple of years now. Without monthly active users growing, the company is going to have trouble growing and bringing in more revenue. However, daily active users did grow 12%, which is the silver lining for Twitter in this earning’s report. In the US, Twitter hasn’t grown that much yet either, going from 69 million last quarter to now 68 million in Q4. Which means Twitter has likely capped its growth in the US, which is unfortunate, but Twitter does have many other countries where it can grow.
As far as revenue goes, Twitter did rake in about $732 million in the quarter. That is up 2% year-over-year, but for the full year, it is down 3%. Breaking down the revenue, advertising was the biggest contribution here, to no surprise. With advertising accounting for $644 million of that $732 million in revenue. Twitter also mentioned that total ad engagements were up 75% in the quarter, compared to a year ago. And cost per engagement or CPE, was down 42% year-over-year. That is up 1% year-over-year. Data licensing and other revenue accounted for around $87 million and that is up 10% compared to Q4 2016. International revenue came in at about $326 million for the quarter, and that’s a 17% increase. In early trading, Twitter’s stock price is at levels it hasn’t seen since 2015. Indicating that investors and Wall Street are very happy with these results from Twitter. The company noted in 2016, that its plan for 2017 was to become a profitable quarter, and it did actually achieve that goal.