The shares of Twitter, which has been struggling to keep pace in the fast-moving world of social media, were hammered Thursday after the company reported no gain in its user base in the past quarter.
Twitter reported a net loss of $116 million in the second quarter, slightly wider than its $107 million loss a year ago.
More significantly, Twitter reported its base of average monthly active users (MAU) was unchanged at 328.8 million compared to the first three months of the year and up just five percent from a year earlier.
Twitter said revenues in the quarter slipped five percent from a year ago to $574 million, and advertising revenue fell eight percent to $489 million.
Shares in Twitter sank 14.1 percent to close at $16.84.
Twitter’s results came in sharp contrast with those of Facebook a day earlier.
The world’s leading social network reported a 71 percent jump in profits to $3.9 billion, fueled by growth in ads delivered to its more than two billion users worldwide.
Analyst Trip Chowdhry at Global Equities Research said Twitter’s “fundamentals are broken” and reiterated his view that it is on a downward spiral that will cost advertising revenue.
“I don’t see any way Twitter can come out of it,” Chowdhry said.
He expected Twitter shares to sink to $10 or less, saying the company lacks mass market appeal and is “trading on entertainers and politicians.”
“If you really can’t accelerate MAU interest given the daily tweets from POTUS, not sure when you will,” said Michael Nathanson, senior research analyst of Moffett Nathanson Research, referring to an acronym for the US president.
President Donald Trump, one of the most active politicians on Twitter, has tweeted multiple times a day on
average since his inauguration in January, according to social media analytics company Zoomph.