Hot on the heels of Facebooks reported slow-down of growth for Q2, Twitter followed suit by reporting not just that growth had slowed, but that they actually lost 1 million active users.
That said, it appears that the decline has been mainly due to their efforts in reducing spam and general misuse of the platform, including their removal of inactive accounts from follower metrics, which in turn removed them from the list of monthly active users.
Health Over Growth
According to their report, the company is prioritising “health” over growth, and as a result of their housekeeping, and GDPR compliance work, they are expecting monthly active users to decline further in Q3.
They therefore expect to lose more “users” in the next quarter, and are estimating that it will be in the mid-single digit millions range.
Market Responds
Despite proactive damage control, the market did not appear to take kindly to the announcement, and shares in the company dropped by 19%, the biggest reduction in share value since 2016.
Although their monthly active users declined, they did show an increase of 11% in daily active use, making this the 7th consecutive quarter in which they showed double-digit daily active user growth.
This has also been it’s second consecutive (and second ever) profitable quarter, after the company showed a profit for the first time in 12 years at the ed of Q4 of 2017, making about $91 Million
The question of course is whether or not they will be able to maintain this profitability.