Twitter (TWTR) is being called its "own worst enemy" by Wired after some not-great first-quarter earnings "leaked" (according to Twitter) in the form of a few tweets. As a result of the bad news, the company's shares fell 18.2% to $42.27, mosly within the hour before the market closed Tuesday. Following after-hours trading, the damage was about $7 billion in market value, the Wall Street Journal says.
#BREAKING: Twitter $TWTR Q1 Revenue misses estimates, $436M vs. $456.52M expected
— Selerity (@Selerity) April 28, 2015
Selerity, explains the Journal with a bit of a sneer, "crawls the Web for financial data." And crying foul, Twitter asked the New York Stock Exchange to halt trading immediately.
We are investigating the source of the leak. (2/2)
— TwitterIR (@TwitterIR) April 28, 2015
In fact, The Nasdaq Stock Market, who host Twitter’s investor-relations page where the announcement was made visible, claims that it “inadvertently made an early version of Twitter’s earnings release publicly accessible.” Selerity just publicized it on a very good platform.
Today’s $TWTR earnings release was sourced from Twitter’s Investor Relations website https://t.co/QD6138euja. No leak. No hack.
— Selerity (@Selerity) April 28, 2015
The numbers: Twitter’s revenue was up 74 percent over the previous year to $450 million, with the company reported a net loss amounting to $162 million.
Average monthly active users were in line with expectations at 18 percent growth to 302 million. However, the numbers for mobile monthly active users fell short of estimates.
“Revenue growth fell slightly short of our expectations due to lower-than-expected contribution from some of our newer direct response products,” CEO Dick Costolo said in the statement.
The Twitter news also came with word that the company will be partnering with Google’s Doubleclick for promoted tweets, as was also announced in a blog post here. Obviously, they hope that will help.
