SAN FRANCISCO _ Not even the never-ending attention Twitter gets from President Donald Trump's tweets was enough to help the social-media company increase its user base during its most recent quarter.
Twitter's shares plunged more than 14 percent, to close Thursday at $16.84, after the company said it averaged 328 million monthly users during its second quarter. Those results were flat with what the company reported during the first quarter a year ago, and also nearly a million users shy of analysts' consensus forecasts for 328.8 million users.
"User growth trends were clearly concerning to many investors," said Brian Wieser, of Pivotal Research. Wieser added that Twitter's U.S. monthly users slipped to 68 million, from 70 million in the first quarter, while international users went up by just 1 million, to 260 million, on a quarter-over-quarter basis.
"We have always believed Twitter to be a niche platform," Wieser said. "We consider its user base to have plateaued."
And even though Twitter's monthly users rose 5 percent from the same period a year ago, the results weren't enough to tamp down concerns about Twitter's position in a growing and crowded market for people's time on social media.
"The MAU (monthly active user) number is the story," said Michael Pachter, who covers Twitter for Wedbush. "No growth. (It's) just not very impressive. The Trump Effect was transitory."
On a conference call to discuss the results, Twitter Chief Operating Officer Anthony Noto tried to highlight the company's daily active users, or DAUs, as a better gauge of Twitter's performance than its monthly active users. Noto said the company didn't have any hard data to support why Twitter's monthly users fell from the first quarter, other than to use the term "exogenous factors" like fewer live or noteworthy events that would normally bring in a wider audience.
Twitter is in a battle with the likes of Facebook and Snap for the amount of time people spend on social media. The company is trying to fashion itself almost like a news source, and touting its social network as the place where people should be going first when they want to find out what's happening in the world.
"We want to deliver under-served audiences and content," Noto said on a conference call to discuss the company's results. "From the head to the tail."
But, even though Noto said Twitter's DAU numbers grew 12 percent from a year ago, those figures were also down from the company's first-quarter year-over-year growth of 14 percent. Twitter doesn't break out exact numbers for its daily active users.
"I think the concern is that the story around DAU growth and MAU improvement has peaked before the company has been able to return to revenue growth," said Scott Kessler, of CFRA Research.
In addition to its user figures, Twitter reported a second-quarter loss of $116.5 million, or 16 cents a share, on $573.9 million in sales, compared with a loss of $107.2 million, or 15 cents a share, on revenue of $602 million in the same period a year ago.
Excluding one-time items, Twitter earned 8 cents per share, which topped analysts' consensus forecasts of a profit of 5 cents a share on $537 million in revenue.
Advertising revenue also declined by 8 percent from a year ago, to $489 million. Of that amount, U.S. ad revenue of $269 million was down 14 percent from the second quarter of 2016.
"While they beat on the top and bottom lines, revenues are not likely to grow much further without user growth," Pachter said. "And they have not done much to address stagnant user growth."
