Twitter has just reported its Q1 2015 earnings, and its stock price is taking a huge hit.
The company reported $436 million in revenue, far short of the $456 million analysts projected. Despite falling short, it’s still a 74% year-over-year increase.
“While we exceeded our EBITDA target for the first quarter, revenue growth fell slightly short of our expectations due to lower-than-expected contribution from some of our newer direct response products,” said Dick Costolo, CEO of Twitter. “It is still early days for these products, and we have a strong pipeline that we believe will drive increased value for direct response advertisers in the future. We remain confident in our strategy and in Twitter’s long-term opportunity, and our focus remains on creating sustainable shareholder value by executing against our three priorities: strengthening the core, reducing barriers to consumption and delivering new apps and services.”
Twitter did top a big user milestone, however. The company reported 302 million monthly active users, up 18% year-over-year and up from 288 million the previous quarter. Still, that’s pretty slow MAU growth.
Here are some more revenue specifics:
Advertising revenue totaled $388 million, an increase of 72% year-over-year. Excluding the impact of year-over-year changes in foreign exchange rates, advertising revenue would have increased 78%; Mobile advertising revenue was 89% of total advertising revenue; Data licensing and other revenue totaled $48 million, an increase of 95% year-over-year; International revenue totaled $147 million, an increase of 109% year-over-year; International revenue was 34% of total revenue.
Twitter is projecting second quarter revenues of $470 million to $485 million, which according to Bloomberg is well below analysts’ projections of $538 million.
Twitter’s stock is crashing as of a result.
The stock began to plunge before the markets closed as the company’s disappointing earnings report leaked early. It wasn’t a hack or anything, just someone at Twitter posting the earnings a bit prematurely. The company that spilled the beans just grabbed them from Twitter’s investor relations site:
Today’s $TWTR earnings release was sourced from Twitter’s Investor Relations website https://t.co/QD6138euja. No leak. No hack.
— Selerity (@Selerity) April 28, 2015
Twitter also announced it has acquired marketing company TellApart.
For Twitter’s full earnings, head here.