On Wednesday morning, Twitter shares jumped more than 10 percent in pre-market trading, as the platform announces user growth and earnings that beat investor expectations.
The platform’s monthly active users grew to 328 million in 2017’s first quarter. The addition of 9 million users increased its growth to 6 percent year over year—the best it’s been in two years.
However, Twitter is still struggling against Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, and its positive news was accompanied by its first-quarter revenue dip.
Revenue in the first quarter, ending March 30, was $548 million, down 8% from $595 million in the same period a year earlier but beating the $512 million expected on average among analysts polled by Yahoo YHOO +0.50% Finance. In the same period a year earlier, Twitter's revenue growth was 36%. Twitter's revenue decline this year is mostly attributable to a decline in its U.S. advertising business, which shrunk 13% year-over-year. By contrast, international revenue increased by 2% year-over-year. (The full report is available here.)
How does Twitter intend to stay afloat? It’s putting its money on live video.
… Twitter is moving its focus away from advertising in the timeline to broadcasting big live events. Over the last three months it pushed 800 hours of live video from big name partners like PBS, the PGA, Bloomberg, and the Halo World Championship. The live video feeds reached an audience of more than 45 million viewers, a 31 percent increase from the same period last year.
The engagement live video is driving on Twitter stems in part from the company's decision to heavily promote it. Twitter is auto-playing videos inside its desktop site, and airing them live from its relatively-new Explore tab. And the company's decision to do so has resulted in some sizable viewership numbers. Twitter's NFL package averaged 3.5 million unique viewers and its Oscars pre and post shows brought in a combined 6.4 million. Meanwhile, its live inauguration day coverage from PBS netted some 8.6 million unique viewers. (BuzzFeed partnered with Twitter on an Election Day show which drew about 7.7 million unique viewers.)
Twitter lost its highly touted live-streaming deal with the National Football League to Amazon, but in March, it announced a partnership with Major League Soccer to offer live videos of games.
The move aligns with video’s emergence as one of the fastest-growing social media trends this year.
DaCast reported that “bandwidth dedicated to video traffic is expected to make up 74 [percent] of internet use this year, and wrote:
Young internet users seem especially drawn to video, which gives us a glimpse of the future. On platforms like Snapchat, users watch over 10 billion videos per day and Facebook accounts for more than 8 billion video views from 500 million viewers per day .
Whether the new focus will be enough to save Twitter from becoming the next Friendster or MySpace remains to be seen.
Forbes reported:
“With 1.6% growth in ad revenue is expected this year, Twitter’s business is essentially stalled,” forecasting firm eMarketer's principal analyst Debra Williamson said in an email. “The recent launch of in-stream video ads will help, but the lack of meaningful growth in usage is weighing heavily on Twitter’s revenue. However, Twitter remains an important place for businesses to conduct customer service and distribute vital corporate information, and it is still the place to go for real-time discussion of news and events."
What do you think of the platform’s new focus, PR Daily readers?
(Image via)from PR Daily News Feed http://ift.tt/2oM3cAk
No comments:
Post a Comment