People Aren't That Into Twitter Anymore

Twitter had its first quarterly earnings report since it went public today, and the news was not good: it's still losing money (it has since its inception), user growth has slowed and the users it does have seem to be using it less.

Twitter had its first quarterly earnings report since it went public today, and the news was not good: it's still losing money (it has since its inception), user growth has slowed and the users it does have seem to be using it less.

While Twitter surpassed expectations on the revenue side with $243 million, it posted a net loss of $511.5 million for the last three months of 2013. That's a staggering amount, though a lot of it went to one-time charges associated with going public and building the company's sales and marketing teams -- things that should pay for themselves eventually.

The real problem is that, for the first time since it began reporting user numbers, those numbers have slowed, growing by just 3.8 percent. And timeline views were down almost 7 percent.

Reuters tells us why this is bad for Twitter:

Twitter's valuation has been predicated in part on the belief it could expand its mainstream appeal and eventually become as ubiquitous as Facebook Inc, which has five times as many users.

There were a few bright spots, however. First, people have been saying that Facebook's popularity is on the decline for some time now, and it still seems to be doing just fine. Second, as Quartz points out, Twitter is getting much more money out of the users it does have: 75 percent more compared to the last three months of 2012. And third, 75 percent of its revenue comes from mobile users, which are a desirable and rapidly-growing market.

Twitter shares fell 18 percent after the earnings were announced, but they're still double what they started at when the stock began trading last November.