Twitter still struggling to grow

Despite the addition of new users this year, Twitter, in its monthly report, has said the company is still lagging behind its estimated figure of users.  

With the addition of new accounts this year, Twitter witnessed a small win. The rise in the accounts saw the company growing to 330 million users as compared to 321 million users last quarter. This, however, is still behind their estimated numbers of 336 million in the same quarter last year.

After the company faced a huge loss, it decided last quarter that it would stop disclosing its monthly user count, with today's report being the last.

Instead of sharing their monthly user figures, Twitter said it would prefer to share their new metric: daily users. This figure appears to be growing more consistently and substantially. It’s now at 134 million, up from 120 million a year ago and 126 million last quarter.

On its earnings call, Twitter executives said multiple times that they are now focussing on growing this stat, rather than the monthly social media usage figure.

That’s a better trend for Twitter, but the number is comparatively less as compared to Facebook which had 1.5 billion daily users as of the end of last year, having added 28 million in the fourth quarter alone. Snapchat had 186 million daily users at the end of 2018. Instagram has 500 million people just looking at stories every day.

Twitter previously said its daily user count isn’t comparable to other social networks because it’s only counting monetizable daily users and not daily users who don’t see ads. It is unclear as to how much other social networks are really increasing their figures with users they can’t show ads.

A couple of factors may have helped Twitter return to monthly user growth this quarter. For one, Twitter claimed to have spent much of their time last year removing out spam accounts and other bad actors which resulted in losing millions of accounts which the company believed to be legitimate monthly users in the process.

The bulk of that work may now be over, as there’s no accompanying warning in Twitter’s earnings release. Twitter also just tends to see more substantial growth during its first quarter each year, so the bigger test will be if this recent growth can be sustained in the coming months. Unfortunately, the answers to this question will lie unanswered as the company plans to start hiding this stat.

Twitter is also using today’s earnings report to highlight the work it’s doing to fight abuse on its platform. The company says that it is now removing 2.5 times as many tweets that share personal information and that 38 per cent of those are detected by machine learning before anyone can report them. “The health of the public conversation on Twitter remains our greatest priority, so people feel safe being a part of the conversation and are able to find credible information on our service,” the company wrote.

Cases pertaining to harassment have been a major issue on Twitter that’s driven people from the platform, and Twitter’s efforts here could help the network grow in the long run, the company said.