Twitters first quarter was a surprise much-needed hit

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Twitter’s first quarter was a surprise, much-needed hit

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In an very un-Twitter move, the company completely beat out the consistent decline of its business that tech observers were expecting.

This is a hugely positive sign for the company, which has seen continued bad news on the whole company operating front. Not only was it able to generate more money than expected, its user numbers also made a surprising spike. Twitter’s faced a ton of scrutiny as to whether it can be another big player in the advertising space, trying to pitch its unique product compared to others like Facebook and Snap.

Now the company is starting to see some good news roll in, and it’ll have to figure out how to capitalize on that momentum. The company said it generated $548 million in revenue with earnings of 11 cents per share. It also added 9 million new users, bringing it to 328 million total monthly active users. Wall Street was looking for earnings of a cent share on revenue of $511.9 million, as well as a much smaller user growth number.

On the scale of good news and very good news, this is going to be logged much closer to the latter. Twitter’s stock is up more than 11% in early trading this morning, which is one of the biggest bumps it’s seen since talks of acquisition of the company popped up.

Last quarter, it became apparent that Twitter’s

advertising business was stalling

. As if its user growth problems weren’t big enough, Twitter’s pitch to Wall Street seemed to be getting more and more difficult — especially given that most of its best days came during days that there were talks about a potential acquisition for the company. During the last call, CEO Jack Dorsey said the goal was to simplify its advertising products.

Twitter now has to deal not only with Facebook being the juggernaut. It’ll be viewed in the scope of Snap as well, which continues to grow rapidly from both a user and revenue front despite its mounting costs. With Snap’s successful IPO, Twitter may have to deal with increased expectations to perform given that many other players are finding themselves able to navigate major changes in the advertising ecosystem.

In the past three months, Twitter’s stock fell yet another 13% or so, continuing to compound its problems. But in the larger scope, Twitter’s stock is only marginally down in the past year. So Twitter may have, for now, found a sort of leveling-off point.

Featured Image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images

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April 25, 2017 at 11:18PM