*By Carlo Versano*
Twitter shares are surging Thursday after the company smashed its third-quarter earnings report, posting a nearly 30 percent increase in year-over-year revenue and a 9 percent increase in the all-important daily active user metric. The release did not disclose the actual number of DAUs.
Shortly before 10 a.m., shares were soaring more than 17 percent, despite the report also disclosing a decline in monthly active users ー from 335 million in the second quarter to 326 million. It's a drop of 4 million year-on-year. Twitter ($TWTR) said that was in part due to a mass culling of bot, troll and fake accounts. The company said there were 20 percent fewer malicious or spammy account sign-ups from the previous quarter, thanks to "decisions we have made to prioritize the health of the platform."
On the earnings call, CEO Jack Dorsey said those decisions will act as a "growth vector" long term. In a statement attached to the earnings release, he said:
"This quarter’s strong results prove we can prioritize the long-term health of Twitter while growing the number of people who participate in public conversation.”
He added: "We're also continuing to introduce improvements that make it easier for people to follow events, topics and interests on Twitter, like adding support for US TV shows in our new event infrastructure."
After years of burning cash, this marks Twitter's fourth consecutive quarter of showing profitability.
Twitter posted adjusted earnings of 21 cents a share on revenue of $758 million. It was the company's fourth straight quarter of profit.
Shares posted their biggest gains in a year.
The gaming industry has been under the spotlight so far this year following some big mergers and acquisitions. This week featured earnings of three major gaming companies, but also Meta and for the latter, things are not doing too hot. Joining Cheddar News to break it all down was Kenny Rosenblatt, President and Co-Founder of Arkadium.
While it was a volatile week in tech as Meta experienced the biggest one-day drop in the history of the U.S. stock market, industry giant Amazon reported 40 percent growth — largely on the strength of the cloud. Dan Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, joined Cheddar News to break down how the e-commerce company stock managed to pop despite headwinds against its core retail business. "It's all about cloud because of sum of the parts, you could argue, amazon could be $3,500/$4,000 stock just based on cloud," he said. Ives also addressed the apparent the differing impact of Apple iOS changes on Facebook and Snapchat.
Following Ford's earnings miss, the stock price dropped despite a bullish outlook from the auto giant. Karl Brauer, an executive analyst with ISeeCars.com, joined Cheddar to break down why investors may not be sold on the carmaker because of the ongoing factor of supply constraints. "The product is not an issue. There's really good product coming from them, including the electric vehicle side, and the demand is not an issue. There's plenty of demand, but nobody really has a solid grasp on when we're going to get past the supply chain issue," said Brauer.
Image-sharing app Pinterest reported big beats on its Q4 earnings for the top and bottom lines. The social platform surprised investors after seeing a decline in users while earnings and revenue were much higher than expected.
