Twitter posted its Q4 2017 numbers today and reported its first ever quarterly profit as a public company.
The San Francisco-based tech firm announced a GAAP net income of $91 million, which compares favorably to the net loss of $167 million during the same period last year and the $21 million net loss for Q3 2017. However, it’s worth noting here that it was a drop in Twitter’s stock-based compensation that enabled it to cut expenses, which in turn helped it finally turn a profit.
Additionally, Twitter reported Q4 revenue of $732 million, up 2 percent year-on-year and up 24 percent on the previous quarter.
Twitter hitting its first profitable quarter is notable news not just for the company but for Wall Street, too, with Twitter’s shares soaring more than 20 percent in pre-market trading.
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Above: Twitter shares: pre-market trading on February 8
However, the metric everyone has been focusing on is user growth. On that front, Twitter reported 330 million monthly active users (MAUs), exactly the same as the previous quarter, though it’s a 4 percent gain on the same period in the previous year.
Digging into the numbers reveals that Twitter’s MAUs in the U.S. actually fell from 69 million to 68 million between Q3 and Q4 2017, a trend that seems to be carrying over from last year, when the company’s U.S. MAUs fell from 70 million to 68 million in Q2 2017. However, these numbers are prone to small fluctuations, so it will be interesting to see how Twitter’s domestic MAUs perform throughout the rest of 2018.
Twitter also reported that its daily active users (DAU) grew by 12 percent year-on-year for a fifth straight quarterly increase.
