Twitter announced their fourth quarter results for 2016 and it still shows that the company is still struggling in several key areas.
Their revenue for Q4 was reported to be $717 million which was only a partly 1% increase year on year of which $638 million was derived from advertising. The total revenue for 2016 was $2.5 billion which was a 14% increase year on year. However, they still made a loss of $167 million in the quarter and a total of $457 million for the entire business year.
When it comes to growth in terms of the number of active users, Twitter’s total monthly active users only grew by 2 million between quarters to a figure of 319 million. Mobile users still make a majority of the total (83%) and they also registered an 11% increase in daily active users between Q3′ 2016 and Q4′ 2016.
These figures pale in comparison to what Facebook posted a week ago. They earned more than three times as much money as Twitter earned in a whole year in a quarter while their active user-base increased by 70 million users in a quarter.
In the quartely report, Twitter revealed that they will be focusing on three areas: Revenue, content and their audience.
In the case for audience, they have done a number of things like new features to the timeline and relevant notifications in the third quarter. They now want to use machine learning across their service this year so that the timeline will deliver personalized content and will make it easy for people to discover what is happening on Twitter.
In terms of content, they did quite a lot in the fourth quarter. Twitter streamed 600 hours of prime live video across 400 events which attracted 31 million unique viewers. They also revealed that 6.6 million hours of live video was broadcasted through Periscope.
Revenue is still a thorny issue for Twitter and in the last quarter, they had only 1% increase in revenue. They still expect revenue growth to lag in 2017 and this has made Twitter to re-evaluate their products which will differentiate the company to advertisers.
