Twitter Surprises Everyone By Actually Making Money

Twitter has been a bit of an oddity in the tech industry since its inception, in that it doesn’t really make much money. Unlike Snapchat, Instagram, or Facebook, the sitting U.S. president’s preferred social media platform doesn’t really get much traction in terms of revenue despite its obvious mainstream popularity. This changed recently when Twitter announced that it hit pay dirt.

One of the biggest reasons for the microblogging platform being unable to compete with its bigger rivals in the social sphere is stagnating user growth. While celebrities, politicians, and other influential figures love using Twitter, not many other people do. So it was a huge surprise when it posted that it made $732 million in revenue, The Washington Post reports.

This figure beat analyst estimates of $686 million and led to a jump in its shares by 22 percent. This is despite the fact that it missed its user growth target by two million and the fact that Twitter users in the U.S. have dropped from 69 million to 68 million.

As to how the company actually managed to make money, it would appear that retention grew by 12 percent. This is basically the number of people who use Twitter on a daily basis and spend much more time on the platform.

While the company celebrates this victory, with CEO Jack Dorsey Tweeting how they supposedly delivered on their promises, the event was met with criticisms and derision. Unfortunately, this has become the pervasive nature of Twitter, with the number of toxic users growing each day. The platform seems completely powerless to stop these trolls, as well.

Ultimately, this is what puts Twitter in the dilemma that it has been trying to solve for years. Trolls on its platform count as users and the more there are of them, the more money the platform makes. Consequently, this also contributes to the stunted growth of the platform, with other users being unwilling to deal with the toxicity.