Twitter Gains Zero New Users in Latest Quarter - The UpStream

Over the last year or so, Twitter's troubles have gotten worse. Leading up to quarterly losses, the company shut down services and laid people off, and even went so far as to try to find a buyer. Since then, the company has doubled down on offerings like live video, and redesigned the platform to make it faster.

All of that work has not generated what the company, and co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey had wanted: new users. In fact, between this quarter and last, the company generated no additional active users. Both this quarter and last, the company saw 328 million active users. Last quarter, that number was up by 7 million, but this quarter is was obviously flat. That is compared to the analyst expected 4 million new users.

Needless to say, investors were not happy with the company's performance. After announcing their failure, the stock plummeted 13 percent, bringing it to $16 per share. This price represents the company's monthly low price. The stock price recovered slightly before closing.

This news comes at a time when the service has received an influx of attention worldwide. The attention comes care of President Trump, who uses the service for all manner of tasks, from challenging opposition to announcing new policy initiatives. Whenever he tweets anything, a flood of support and resistance is posted in response. With that kind of activity, investors and analysts expected an influx in new users, there to show their support or disagreement with whatever is posted. However, what seems to be happening is the exact opposite. It is possible that new users are actually being dissuaded from joining because of the consistent negativity that the service is producing.

In response to the negative perception, Twitter has produced a system prevent harassment using its service. The company hopes that in fixing the environment, they will fix some of their growth issues. It is possible, however, that this will also produce an inverse reaction. If the intention for many users is to contradict tweets posted by the President, or to communicate with those they disagree with, then preventing harassment is the opposite of what many users are looking for. In fact, many in the opposition are looking to do just the opposite.