Twitter’s stock shot up more than 18% on Thursday after a rare, positive investor call, where they announced quarterly earnings much higher than expected ($590m actually vs. $586.7m expected).
While their quarterly revenue was still down 4% from last year, they managed to cushion their losses with an $87m uptick in data licensing revenue — cutting their Q3 losses to only $21m.
In other words… they might have a profitable Q4. *GASP*
How’d they do it?
Despite recently admitting to inadvertently overcounting their active users since 2014, they did add 4m users in Q3, putting their correct total to 330m monthly users, which is huge.
And aside from growing their audience, the company’s CEO Jack Dorsey credited their progress to signing a “significant number” of enterprise deals and achieving record profitability ($0.10 earnings per share — nearly double analysts’ predictions).
So what do they have to do to finally have a profitable quarter?
After cutting expenses and loading up on deals to sell its data to outside companies, Twitter’s says their next move is to lower their dependence on ad revenue.
And, as long as they keep exceeding their investor’s (fairly moderate) expectations like they did in Q3, they should be well on their way.