Twitter shares plunge on growth worries
It was only last fall that Twitter (TWTR) staged its wildly successful IPO, with a feeding frenzy among investors sending the social network's stock up 73 percent on its first day as a public company.
Tough crowd. Late in Thursday's trading session, Twitter shares were down 23 percent a day after the company's latest earnings report. Although Twitter beat analyst expectations, it also revealed that it is adding users at a much slower pace.
"Along the way, a lot of other players jumped in with interesting
twists on the Facebook approach -- interesting ideas and ways of providing
slightly different services," said Larry Chiagouris, a professor of
marketing at Pace University, in an interview with CBS MoneyWatch. "But
there's the problem: None of them can make it without advertising support.
There's a finite limit to how many advertising dollars are available, particularly
for what are relatively speaking unproven media vehicles."
The pie is
growing, in other words, but with more and more social media companies competing for ad dollars, each slice is smaller.
Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia downgraded Twitter shares on Thursday, giving the stock an "underperform" rating and highlighting the company's decelerating
user growth. According to MoneyWatch calculations,
although the number of average users Twitter drew per month last quarter increased 30
percent over the year-ago period, that figure was up only 4 percent over the previous quarter.
Another reason Bhatia downgraded Twitter was a decline in user
engagement measured in so-called timeline views, as Jim Edwards reported at Business Insider. And, according
to figures from Twopcharts, which tracks Twitter users, there are 940
million registered user accounts on Twitter, but only a quarter of them use
the system even once a month.
That could indicate that most people who try the social network don't find anything compelling, suggesting that Twitter will struggle to attract users.