Twitter released its third quarter earnings report on Thursday and revealed that it had miscalculated the number of users it had by the millions.
Twitter Incorrectly Calculated Users
Its monthly total of active users in the second quarter, for example, was actually in the order of 326 million, not 328 million as it had originally been reported. It now claims to have 330 million active users – which means an increase of 4 million instead of 2 million. The social media company explained that the counting errors occurred because "since the fourth quarter of 2014", it "included users of certain third-party applications" and "they should not have been taken into account" .
Specifically, Twitter included all users of its old product "Digits", which users could use to connect to third-party applications with a simple phone number. But just because someone accessed Digits, does not mean that they were using Twitter. And Twitter sold its numbers to Google well before the end of the first or second quarter.
The retroactive adjustment makes the growth of the user more attractive now because of the greater proportion of development, but could theoretically have deceived investors who were misled by the incorrect figures.
Other revealing statistics include a slight decline in revenues ($ 590 million) compared to the same point last year ($ 616 million), a decrease of about 4% . On the other hand, the losses fell significantly with a total loss of $ 21 million in the third quarter, while the third quarter of 2016 was $ 103 million in deficit.
Of course, as a leader and spokesperson, CEO Jack Dorsey said the results are promising.
"This quarter, we have made progress in three key areas of our business: we have increased our audience and commitment, made progress toward a return to revenue growth and achieved record profitability," Dorsey writes in a press release. . "We are proud that the improvements we are making to the product continue to bring people back to Twitter every day."
A Twitter spokesperson declined to elaborate on the details of miscalculations beyond what she offered on the report.
Reissued with permission. Original here.
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