Twitter on Wednesday published its consolidated financial report for the first quarter of the year, revealing it remained profitable immediately after posting the first net income in its history for the three-month period ending December 31. The San Francisco, California-based social media giant also added six million users in Q1 2018, three million more than it attracted over the previous three quarters combined. The user growth also beat its own expectations which were sitting at five million and were labeled by some analysts as optimistic, with the company’s profits amounting to $61 million, or 16 cents per share, three cents per share less than in Q4 2017. Total revenue reached $665 million and was mostly in line with both internal and street expectations.
Twitter stock is still down roughly four percent as of Wednesday morning PST, with some industry watchers speculating the development is related to the firm’s revenue forecast that remains modest and is officially expected to resemble its sequential revenue growth from 2016 when the company posted incremental quarterly turnover gains. Regardless, after losing money for more than four straight years since its initial public offering in late 2013, Twitter now made over $150 million in the last two quarters and is showing signs of being capable of maintaining a sustainable business in the long term, not so much due to any large user growth but the ability to monetize its existing users.
The social media platform may still have some cause for near-term concern that’s outside of its scope of influence, with Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal recently drawing more regulatory attention to the Silicon Valley and digital industry in the United States as a whole. The issue of online privacy is now a subject of heated debates in the country and may eventually lead to stricter laws on the manner in which user data is collected, managed, and used by technology firms, possibly affecting Twitter’s business model that’s only now demonstrating its viability based on more than just promises.