No matter how much you've read about Twitter’s troubles, the platform is enjoying a burst of encouraging signs.
Driving the news: Twitter's Q1 numbers came in high today: 330 million monthly active users, 134 million visiting every day, and $787 million in revenue, beating analyst expectations.
Why it matters: When news happens, and when there's a major cultural event, Twitter is the second screen.
- Twitter is building its key measurement around those spikes, focusing on daily active users, instead of monthly, and they're growing on that metric, particularly internationally.
- But Twitter keeps getting criticized for brand safety during those spikes: Women and people of color face repeated harassment, fake news proliferates and the platform struggles to control propaganda and violence.
The big picture: Snapchat has more daily active users (186M). So does Instagram (500M for stories alone). And Facebook itself has 1.5 billion, The Verge notes.
- That scale matters, especially for advertising.
- It also matters for the future of Twitter. On the internet, at least, once you stop growing, you start shrinking.
Between the lines: "Twitter, which has a history of being slow to make changes to its service, has recently increased the pace of new product introductions," Bloomberg reports.
- "Last month it opened access to its prototype app, called twttr, to test new ideas and get feedback."
- "The company is also rolling out a Snapchat-like camera feature that lets users post videos or photos in a swipe."
P.S. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and President Trump met behind closed doors at the White House today, Motherboard first reported and a Twitter spokesperson confirmed.
