Twitter’s Q4 Financial Results Send Investors Into A Frenzy

Twitter’s share price has soared more than 11 percent following the publication of its FY 2014 Q4 results – despite significant losses.

Investors were buoyed by the micro-blogging platform’s burgeoning advertising revenues – though reports of another nine-digit net loss and sluggish user growth were delicately skipped over.

The results showed that Twitter has enjoyed a big spike in revenues, precisely 97 percent year-on-year to hit $479m in the fourth quarter.

Money in mobile

Mobile is key to this growth. While Twitter makes $2.37 in ad revenues for every 1,000 timeline views on its service, 80 percent of its active users accessed Twitter from a mobile device last quarter. Unsurprisingly then, mobile ads accounted for 88 percent of Twitter’s $432m of advertising revenue.

However, despite this increased monetisation the company recorded another net loss in the fourth quarter of 2014. A cash vacuum of $125.4 million brought Twitter’s total losses for 2014 to $577.8m.

On the bright side, that is less than its $645.3m net loss in 2013 – perhaps one of the reasons why investors are still vying for a slice of the network’s shares.

CEO Dick Costolo is similarly optimistic. In an earnings call with analysts, he attributed dips in the figures to “seasonality.”

Interestingly he also pointed the finger at Apple, blaming the Cupertino company for the loss of four million net users after Twitter integrated with Apple’s iOS 8 software. He claimed that there was “an unforeseen bug in the release of iOS 8 as it relates to specific Twitter integration.”

Costolo promised that Twitter’s results for Q1 of 2015 will be even stronger, saying that they will be “back in the range of absolute net ads that we saw during the first three quarters of 2014.”

Are you a Twitter know-it-all? Take our quiz to find out!