Twitter Revenue Up 114% in Q3, But No Mention of Music
Twitter's third-quarter earnings results showed continued growth in revenue and monthly active users, but there was little useful information for onlookers in the music industry. The San…
Twitter’s third-quarter earnings results showed continued growth in revenue and monthly active users, but there was little useful information for onlookers in the music industry. The San Francisco-based company posted net loss of $175.5 million on revenue of $361.3 million, up 114 percent from the prior-year period.
In the first nine months of the year, Twitter had a net loss of $452.5 million on revenues of $923.9 million. The company will be able to burn through cash as it grows: Twitter ended the third quarter with cash of $2.3 billion thanks to the issuance of $1.8 billion of convertible notes in September.
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But there were a few takeaways for the entertainment industry. First is Twitter’s ability to monetize mobile usage. In the third quarter, advertising revenue grew 109 percent to $320 million, with 85 percent coming from mobile platforms. Mobile users accounted for 80 percent of monthly active users. This points to a strong mobile advertising business and should allay fears that advertising-based music service like Pandora will not be able to turn mobile listening into dollars.
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Second, the numbers show Twitter is still growing but is not getting more engagement. Monthly active users grew 23 percent year-over-year to 284 million, slightly worse than the 24-percent growth — fueled by the World Cup — in the second quarter. But users appear to be less engaged. Timeline views per user fell 7 percent to 636 globally and slipped 6 percent in the United States — where monetization rates are high — to 774.
As for Vine, the video-sharing platform Twitter acquired in 2012, don’t expect advertisements to intrude on the user experience any time soon. When asked about its intentions to monetize Vine, the company said its “near-term and immediate-term in vine are continuing to build beautiful content creation tools for all of the users of that service.”
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