Twitter is one of the ambitious players in the competitive market of social media. The company has to deliver great results in order to attract investors. Some of the indexes that have the power to determine entrepreneurs to support the company are user numbers. However, it turns out that Twitter has been displaying wrong stats for years.
The Mishap in Twitter’s Reported User Numbers Came from an Incongruent Segment of Data
On Thursday, Twitter claimed that the company has been delivering excessive stats about monthly active users for years. However, this type of mistake appeared the moment Twitter took the numbers coming from third-party applications into consideration when it did the math.
The company explained the mix-up in its quarterly earnings report. Their partners have to send SMS with notifications of authentication to Twitter. This routine was enabled by a software development service on the Fabric platform called Digits. However, it was only recently that Twitter learned that these reports were not describing the activity they intercepted from Twitter.
Therefore, Twitter made this finding public immediately. It also took upon itself the mission to rectify this mistake that went on for years.
As a result, the updated reports are now indicating one to two million fewer active users over the last three quarters. On the other hand, the error has been infiltrating these records since the fourth quarter of 2014.
Twitter Reported the First Signs of Profitability Since It Went Public in 2013
Nonetheless, the quarterly report wasn’t all about mishaps. On the contrary, the mistake was belittled by a major first for the company. The last quarter represents the first period of time since the company went public when it showed signs of profitability.
The last three months marked great improvements for the company. This evolution can translate into a profitable fourth quarter for Twitter. The social media platform became a publicly traded organization in 2013.
The new improvements coincide with the latest actions CEO Jack Dorsey took to reform the company. These events consisted of massive rounds of layoffs and closures for unprofitable projects such as Vine. He also changed the format of the platform, like removing character limit.
“This quarter we made progress in three key areas of our business: we grew our audience and engagement, made progress on a return to revenue growth, and achieved record profitability.”
At the moment, Twitter has 330 million users at a worldwide level. The company managed to boost user numbers last quarter for the first time in the last four years. This is a powerful sign that advisers needed to start making the most of this platform. The profitability for the fourth quarter will come from publicity.
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