Yesterday, the 12-year-old social media network posted their Q4 earnings — and for the first time ever, they put up a modest profit.
As we anticipated back in October, the company was in the green ($91m) for the quarter, on a reported revenue of $732m (a 2% bump from this time last year).
Chalk it up to targeted ads
This newly minted profitability is largely thanks to improvement in the click-through rate of Twitter’s targeted ads, led by machine learning advancements.
Twitter also benefited from a boost in global growth: while revenue was down 8% in the US, it shot up 17% in the rest of the world, including a 34% increase in Japan.
It’s about damn time
Twitter has experienced a bit of a stagnation in recent years and has suffered slower than expected user growth.
When the company went public in 2013, they had 218m users; now they’re at 330m — the same as Q3, and only a 4% gain YoY. By comparison, Facebook went from 845m to 2.13B users in a similar timeframe.
Regardless, the company’s profitability excited investors: stock jumped as high as $34 per share (a 20% hike) after the earnings call.