![](https://d15shllkswkct0.cloudfront.net/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2019/02/twitterfinancials.jpg)
![](https://d15shllkswkct0.cloudfront.net/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/2019/02/twitterfinancials.jpg)
Shares in Twitter dropped by nearly 10 percent in trading today as the company revealed another drop in user numbers and said it expects expenses to rise.
The data came from Twitter’s fourth-quarter financial results, which beat market expectations in terms of revenue and profit.
For the fourth quarter, Twitter booked revenue of $909 million versus a market expectation of $868.1 million, a figure also significantly up on the $758 million in revenue booked in the third quarter.
Net income came in at $244 million with diluted earnings per share of 33 cents, beating a prediction of 25 cents.
Although the financial figures were good for the quarter, Twitter’s bugbear is its user numbers. The microblogging service reported that its monthly active users came in at 321 million, worse than even the market had predicted.
This was the second straight quarter Twitter reported a drop in MAUs ,with the number down 5 million from 326 million from the third quarter. In the second quarter, Twitter had 336 million MAUs.
Twitter claims that the drop in user numbers was the result of “product changes that reduced the number of email notifications sent, as well as decisions we have made to prioritize the health of the service and not move to paid SMS carrier relationships in certain markets, and, to a lesser extent, changes we made to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe.”
Given its ongoing decline in MAUs, Twitter has simply decided to abandon reporting the metric in future quarters and is switching to “monetizable” daily active users instead.
Those, according to Twitter, are Twitter users who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through twitter.com or the Twitter applications that can show ads.
Twitter said it had 126 million mDAUs in the fourth quarter, up from 124 million in the third quarter and 120 million in the first quarter.
Twitter may have switched to the mDAU metric to deflect attention away from its declining MAUs, but he figures also show how much smaller the company is compared with other players in the social networking space.
Snap Inc., by comparison, has 186 million daily users while Facebook Inc. across its various apps reported 1.52 billion daily active users in the previous quarter.
Looking forward, Twitter said that it expected to book between $715 million to $775 million in revenue in the first quarter, in line with market predictions. But it also added that it expects operating expenses to increase 20 percent to bolster initiatives across “health, conversation, revenue product and sales and platform.”
Twitter shares dropped 9.8 percent to close at $30.80.
THANK YOU