Statistics released by microblogging site Twitter have shown that the number of monthly active users on the platform has dropped, and this has had a knock-on effect on company shares, which have tumbled by 17%.
However, despite a fall in both shares and monthly users, the company has reported record quarterly profits, meaning that the company has now delivered three consecutive profitable quarters. This has mainly come from the revenue generated from advertising, which has also risen.
According to the statistics, the number of Twitter users actively using the site on a monthly basis has seen a dip of around one million users on the previous quarter, and now stands at around 335 million.
During this second quarter, Twitter has been actively removing fake accounts from the site that manipulate the platform, and the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey has said that these statistics reflect these changes. Furthermore, the company expects this trend to continue into the third quarter, anticipating the number of users to drop again.
Dorsey explained that the company is doing all it can to ensure that the genuine users of the site continue to get value from the platform on a daily basis. He continued to add that the company wants its users to feel safe on the site while freely expressing their opinions, and to help this to continue, the company will be launching new tools that will address behavioural problems that distract and distort from public conversation.
Over the past months, tech firms and social media sites have been under a lot of pressure in different parts of the world to be much stricter on abusive content and fake news, as well as political influences and the protection of users’ personal data.
Twitter has endeavoured to make the site safer by removing or suspending a number of accounts that it believes are in breach of its terms of use, and has suggested that this is the main reason for a drop in users. The majority of this fall came from accounts based in the USA.
In contrast, Dorsey has said that the number of daily users has increased by 11% compared to the same quarter of last year, stating that this demonstrates the company’s measures were turning it into a daily utility to users.
Twitter’s sales for the quarter stood at $711m (£542m) and this is up 24% compared with last year’s figures. Furthermore, this is above what analysts expected for the company. The site has said that it had benefited from a number of ads that were related to the FIFA World Cup, which took place in Russia during June and July. This contributed to the $100m (£76.2m) profit it made during the quarter.
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