Ginny Marvin says, “After Twitter reported stagnant user growth in the fourth quarter — with a decline in US users and an overall global bump of just three percent year over year — share prices started sinking, and the doomsday press coverage churned. In all of this, a revenue story that might otherwise read as promising, if not meteoric, gets drowned out by stories of executive departures, a product that’s too complicated and riddled with bots and endless comparisons to Facebook.

There is, in fact, a pretty solid revenue growth story, but even that gets drowned out by comparisons to Facebook’s meteoric success. But remember those years before Facebook figured out mobile advertising? Ad product changes and inconsistent communication to advertisers led many to have serious doubts the company could make the transition. Then they figured it out. Whereas Facebook’s product was strong and attracted droves of users, it was having trouble monetizing those users. Twitter, on the other hand, has had a turbulent product history, to say the least (CTO Adam Messinger is now also heading product after Kevin Weil left for Instagram in January), but it’s been able to drive ad revenue despite its shortcomings. In Twitter’s case, the cart is outpacing the horse.

Twitter might not be the most intuitive service, but it continues to hold a unique position in the zeitgeist of live, real-time content. Even though the company hasn’t been able to tout native user growth for more than two years, ad revenue continues to grow, and brand advertisers join in at a healthy clip”.

Twitter’s User Growth Stalled And Advertisers Don’t Care (Yet)

Marketing Land

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