Twitter can’t say it has solved its user problem this quarter. But its revenue story is still a good one.
Twitter Says It’s Going to Make More Money Than It Thought This Year. Wall Street Yawns.
Dick Costolo bumps up his revenue and earnings projections for 2014. Doesn’t matter.
Asa Mathat
Peter Kafka covered media and technology, and their intersection, at Vox. Many of his stories can be found in his Kafka on Media newsletter, and he also hosts the Recode Media podcast.
Dick Costolo’s company, which was already on track to do more than a billion dollars in 2014, says it’s going to do better this year than it had previously thought.
Twitter now says it expects to earn $1.2 billion to $1.25 billion this year, up from earlier projections of $1.15 billion to $1.2 billion. It bumped up its adjusted earnings number as well: It thinks it will make $180 million to $205 million, up from $150 million to $180 million.
It’s possible that Wall Street is concerned about the fact that Twitter is making less money from its users than it did last quarter. Revenue per “thousand timeline views,” the metric Twitter has been using to explain how it turns eyeballs into cash, was $1.44 in Q1, down from $1.49 in the previous quarter.
But most likely Twitter stock is down — it has fallen 9 percent in after-hours trading — purely based on its user numbers. They’re up, but not as much as the Street would like. Until Twitter gives investors what it wants — or convinces them to accept a different number — this story isn’t going to change.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
