Twitter Stock Plunges 21 Percent After Earnings Show Effects of Fake-Account Purge (marketwatch.com)

Twitter shares fell 21% on Friday as the company reported that user growth had turned negative, even as its quarterly results beat Wall Street expectations. The decline was even greater than Facebook's almost 19 percent plunge in shares after the social media giant reported disappointing results. MarketWatch reports: Twitter posted a profit for the third consecutive quarter, with its $134 million in net income equating to 13 cents a share. Adjusted per-share earnings came to 17 cents. The FactSet consensus estimate had been 16 cents. Twitter's revenue climbed 24% to $710.5 million to beat the FactSet consensus estimate by about $2 million. Even as executives talked about Twitter's bright future on the earnings calls, investors appeared to react to Twitter's slowing user growth, as its monthly user count went south, falling by 1 million to 355 million, as compared with the year's first quarter. The decline was expected after recent reports had the company purging about a million fake accounts a day.

Comments

Re:The election brought in a ton of money

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you saying the media was easy on Trump? You are delusional.

I wonder if the media are ready to call out these folks?;

Obama’s chief economist: Trump’s economic projections are “the most absurd I’ve ever seen” He predicts huge growth rates, of 3 percent a year, without explaining how he’d get there.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/19/17012288/trump-budget-proposal-obama-chief-economist-jason-furman-interview

Obama: Trump lacks ‘magic wand’ to grow economy. “He just says, ‘I’m gonna negotiate a better deal.’ Well how? How exactly are you going to negotiate that?”

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/watch-live-president-obamas-town-hall-in-elkhart-indiana

Team Obama: Sorry, America, the ‘new normal’ may be here to stay

"The good times may be over for good. In a speech to the Economic Club of New York yesterday, US Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said the US GDP growth rate, adjusted for inflation, is now projected to run a little above 2% a year."

http://www.aei.org/publication/team-obama-sorry-america-the-new-normal-may-be-here-to-stay/

If Trump thinks he can get more than 3% economic growth, he's dreaming

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-3percent-20170519-story.html

Then there are the nonpolitical observers, such as bond guru Bill Gross, who says: "High rates of growth, and the productivity that drives it, are likely distant memories from a bygone era." And academic economists such as Northwestern's Robert J. Gordon, who states bluntly in his pessimistic book "The Rise and Fall of American Growth" that U.S. GDP's best years are behind it.

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-3percent-20170519-story.html

Re:The election brought in a ton of money

[Highdude702]

Where do you get your weed man? I need some of that.

Just to be clear

[Okian Warrior]

I honestly think one of the main reasons Trump won was the media's refusal to call him out on obvious lies and his shady business record. And that refusal was fueled by a desire to see a horse race and to suck up all those ad buys. Trump should never have been a serious candidate. He refused to release his tax returns, has a string of failed businesses and a court case where he admitted under oath his net worth isn't near what he claims and a long history of extra-marital affairs of the sort that don't go down well with the base he was trying to appeal to. That baggage should have wrecked him. But the media continually went easy on him even as they piled on Hillary.
Of course if they'd buried Trump in his own bad press early on folks would have stopped paying attention and the guys bank rolling his campaign would stop; meaning no more free eyeballs and no more free ad money. Trump got something like a billion in free coverage most of it positive. But then again if the media was doing it's job we'd be calling Bernie Mr President.

Okay, just so I'm clear here.

You think the media *wasn't* incessantly harsh on Trump in the run-up to the election.

You think most of the media coverage was positive.

I am at a loss as to how, exactly, the media could have been more harsh...

It's about time

[timholman]

Using Twitter is like playing Russian Roulette. Every time you tweet, you pull the trigger. Most of the time, nothing happens, but sooner or later you'll get unlucky and the Internet mob will destroy you for what you tweeted (latest case in point: James Gunn).

Maybe, just maybe, people are finally beginning to realize just how toxic Twitter really is. It only took a few thousand ruined lives and careers to get the point across.

Just so we're clear

[raymorris]

> Using Twitter is like playing Russian Roulette. Every time you tweet, you pull the trigger.
> case in point: James Gunn

So what you're saying is every time you talk, things like this might spill out of your mouth?:

"I like when little boys touch me in my silly place."
-- James Gunn

"The best thing about being raped is when youâ(TM)re done being raped and itâ(TM)s like 'whew this feels great, not being raped!'"
-- James Gunn

"walked over a table to one of the kid actors on set, looked at the kid, and started masturbating right at him. ... A string of semen shot out of the mini-monkey-wood and splash-landed DIRECTLY ON THE KID.
Screaming and freaking out commenced.
I know it might be sick, but that story makes me extremely happy."
-- James Gunn

"Watching Trapped in the Closet, R Kellyâ(TM)s second best video after the one where he urinates on a child.â
-- James Gunn

If these are the kinds of things you might randomly say, your Russian roulette, please - get help.

And this is the result of so-called "investment"

[Puls4r]

The average person the street is not smart enough to understand that "investors" have not a damn thing to do with real performance. They'll see this and think that somehow twitter is not a profitable or sustaining company, despite the fact that their profits are good.

What we have is irresponsible profit-driven reporters who want short clips rather than explaining what this actually means.

And in the mean time, we have a bunch of idiots who are so absorbed with another idiots that all they want to do is talk politics and trash talk eachother.

This easily could have been titled "Childish investors with no foresight have knee-jerk reaction to something that was already predicted." Or perhaps "Company does the right thing, angers investors."

Stock price no longer has any real tie in with the success or failure of companies. It's just a ticker number that people who participate in real-life gambling pay attention to.