There is a better-than-average chance that you use Twitter at least once in a while. Maybe you even use it on a daily basis, several times a day. With that being said, you might not even realize that Twitter has actually been publicly traded on the stock market for four years now. However, it has never managed to be profitable until right now.
It seems a little disconcerting to think of an entity that has been publicly traded for four years and has never managed to record a profit until the last quarter of 2017. The truth is, practically any other business that experiences this problem would have long ago gone out of business because it wouldn’t have had enough funds to operate. However, Twitter is a little bit different. It doesn’t really cost all that much to operate and despite its inability to make a profit, it has always been enormously popular as a social media platform.
Remember, not all social media platforms are privatized, so a lot of them aren’t traded to begin with. Despite Twitter’s woes on Wall Street, it has maintained about 300 million active users for quite some time. While its developers have not enjoyed the growth but they would really like to see, and while there was virtually no growth during this last quarter of 2017 when it comes to active users, Twitter did post approximately a 12 percent growth rate for the entire year.
Perhaps more importantly, they reported a 91 million dollar profit, and that was only for the last quarter of 2017. It seems rather shocking to think that they weren’t capable of recording a profit in any capacity prior to that and then in a single quarter they made such a vast amount of money, but those are the numbers. In addition, the stock in Twitter went up 14 percent during the same time.
What does all of this really mean? Basically, it doesn’t mean anything if you are a user of Twitter and you only use it as a social media platform. It only means something if you have stock in the company and you are trading that stock. In that case, it means that your stock is finally worth something after sitting there dormant for almost four years. Considering the volatility of the stock market, no one really knows what will happen with it during the next quarter.
It might be more important to realize that Twitter could potentially be paving the way for other social media platforms to make the decision to trade publicly. Despite the fact that social media has been around for a number of years now, it is all still relatively new when it comes to understanding the profitability of these types of companies, especially when it comes to Wall Street. Eventually, things could change but it really depends how Twitter does over the next few years. In reality, this is a situation that can change dramatically in the course of a few hours, not to mention a few years. Hopefully, the company will continue to turn a profit with each upcoming quarter.
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