Welcome to "#SocialStocks," The Fly's weekly recap of Wall Street's reactions to social media stock news.
TWITTER CHANGES USER DATA REPORTING: Twitter (TWTR) reported its fiscal fourth quarter results on February 7. The microblogging site reported Q4 earnings per share of 31c and revenue of $909M, against analyst expectations of 25c and $869.5M, respectively. Twitter also provided Q1 guidance, expecting Q1 revenue of $715M-$775M, against a consensus estimate of $763.43M.
Notably, the company reported its Q4 monthly active users decreased both sequentially and year-over-year. MAUs were 321M in Q4 of this year, 330M last year, and 326M in Q3. The company also announced that it will no longer provide MAU data, instead reporting monetizable daily active users, or mDAU. "We want to provide something valuable to people on Twitter every day, and we believe that monetizable DAU, or mDAU, and its related growth, are the best ways to measure our success. Monetizable DAU are Twitter users who log in and access Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or our Twitter applications that are able to show ads. Our mDAU are not comparable to current disclosures from other companies, many of whom share a more expansive metric that includes people who are not seeing ads. We considered changing our disclosure to be comparable to other companies, but our goal was not to disclose just the largest daily active user number we could. We want to align our external stakeholders around one metric that reflects our goal of delivering value to people on Twitter every day and monetizing that usage.” Twitter reported Q4 mDAUs of 126M.
SNAPCHAT HAS MORE DAILY USERS THAN TWITTER: When Snap Inc. (SNAP) reported its Q4 results on February 5, the company announced that its daily active users, or DAUs, were stabilizing, as DAUs were 186M in both Q4 and Q3. On February 7, after Twitter reported its Q4 results, Recode’s Kurt Wagner wrote a report that highlighted the fact that Twitter’s mDAUs of 126M were below Snapchat’s DAUs of 186M.
INSTAGRAM’S ACCIDENTAL PURGE: Some users woke up this morning with significantly less Instagram followers than they had when they went to sleep last night. Speculation on Twitter showed many users chalked the loss to a purge of fake, or bot, accounts; however, Instagram, the photo-sharing app in Facebook’s (FB) family of apps, announced in a tweet that a purge was not actually the case, “We're aware of an issue that is causing a change in account follower numbers for some people right now. We're working to resolve this as quickly as possible." As a point of reference, Social Media Examiner CEO Michael Stelzner, who had over 10,000 followers prior to this issue, currently has over 1,700 followers.
LINKEDIN FINALLY GOING LIVE: On February 11, Techcrunch reported that Microsoft's (MSFT) LinkedIn is launching an invite-only beta for a new live video streaming feature the business network is calling "LinkedIn Live." TechCrunch reporter Ingrid Lunden added that LinkedIn is a bit late to live video streaming, as it's already available on Google's (GOOG, GOOGL) YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook.
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Snap
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Microsoft
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Alphabet
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Alphabet
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