Evan ThomasTwitter gave a mostly strong performance in its first quarter as a publicly traded company, but Wall Street saw room for improvement.
The company cleared $243 million in revenue, for a boost of more than 100 percent from this time last year, before the company went public. Twitter also announced 241 million monthly active users as of December 2013. That's up 30 percent year over year, but an increase of only nine million users from the previous quarter.
And despite otherwise solid performance, that slow growth's got Wall Street worried.
"“Twitter's a young company, yes, it's nice to see that revenue number higher than expected. but you really want to see those fundamentals. The numbers of users, the engagement of users strongly higher." (Via CNBC)
Bloomberg says that engagement is lagging behind Twitter's overall valuation.
"How is it growing? It really ain't. The numbers don't look really solid. They don't look like the explosive growth of the stock valuation or the excitement about it."
But Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has a plan to bump user numbers back on track. (Via Flickr / Joi Ito)
According to The Verge, Costolo proposes "improving the experience for new users, particularly on mobile devices; making it easier to have both public and private conversations on Twitter; and inserting more pictures and video into the timeline in an effort to attract more casual users."
Costolo said his improvements would take effect over the course of 2014. Twitter is forecasting $240 million in revenue for the next quarter, and totals of as much as $1.2 billion by this time next year.
Of more immediate note is the company’s stock price — Wall Street was carving off more than 22 percent of the company’s market cap in trading before the bell. (Via Google)
