Twitter results: video is not enough

Despite initiatives around video and related ad formats, Twitter remained in the red in 2016.


Exit the "monthly users"; "Daily users".

Twitter changes its approach in its financial communication, at the time of publishing its 2016 results.

As of December 31, the company headed by Jack Dorsey reported 319 million of these "monthly users" *, defined as having connected to the social network at least once a month, whether through the site, A mobile app - including third party - or SMS service. They were 305 million a year earlier. The base therefore grew by less than 5% in this range.

The average number of users per day is sharper: in the 4th quarter, the indicator recorded an annual increase of 11%, in line with the 3%, 5% and 7% increase over the previous three Quarters.

The loyalty and commitment that is supposed to illustrate this metric is not really reflected in revenue, particularly in the 4th quarter, for which turnover was $ 717 million (+ 1%) ... With a slight decline in advertising business, which amounted to $ 638 million.

Over the year, sales reached $ 2.53 billion (+ 14%), of which $ 2.248 billion came from advertising (+ 13%), with the remainder ($ 282 million or + 26% Licenses for the exploitation of data.

Despite spending on R & D (-12%, $ 713 million) and sales / marketing (-9% to $ 958 million), operating income remained at $ 367 million GAAP accounting. After taxes, a loss of $ 457 million, compared to $ 521 million in 2015.

The video lever

Together with machine learning, which will make it possible to improve the relevance of tweets and notifications presented to users, live video broadcasting is one of the main areas of development for 2017.

Twitter said it has gathered 31 million unique visitors on its 600 hours of streamed content in the 4th quarter on "more than 400 events" including the NFL (U.S. Football League) matches.

Small appeal to advertisers: Nearly 50% of these unique visitors are under 25 and 33% are based outside the United States.

The ramp-up of the video format resulted, among other things, in the introduction in the mobile application for iOS of a system allowing viewing of live broadcasts while consulting other content. Live video is also one of the components of the Explore experience, which combines trends, research and the "Moments" curator.

In his letter to shareholders (PDF document, 19 pages), Twitter says that video is the most promising advertising format in terms of revenue.

First View, which offers advertisers a 24-hour exclusivity at the top of user timelines, is also growing. The dynamics are less favorable for the sponsored tweets as for the more traditional formats.

* Statistics which, according to Twitter, may not be completely accurate, in particular because about 8.5% of users use at least one third-party application that can connect in the background.