It’s a bad day for Twitter. Selerity, a company that tracks real-time financial data, managed to get a hold of the Twitter’s first quarter financial results early, and posted tweets about results that largely came in under or in line with Wall Street’s expectations. Since then, the company’s stock plunged more than 18 percent in regular trading, and has continued to fall in after hours trading after the market closed.
The social networking firm reported total revenue of $436 million, which was slightly more than $20 million below the consensus estimate from analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters. Its quarterly earnings of 7 cents a share came in above Wall Street’s expectations of 4 cents a share, but that wasn’t enough to sway investors.
Twitter Dick Costolo said in a press release announcing the results that the lower than expected revenue was partially the fault of underperforming direct response advertising products that the company introduced recently.
“It is still early days for these products, and we have a strong pipeline that we believe will drive increased value for direct response advertisers in the future,” he said. “We remain confident in our strategy and in Twitter’s long-term opportunity, and our focus remains on creating sustainable shareholder value by executing against our three priorities: strengthening the core, reducing barriers to consumption and delivering new apps and services.”
To boost its advertising capabilities, the company also announced today that it’s acquiring TellApart, a startup that’s focused on providing retargeting and email marketing tools for online retailers and e-commerce advertisers. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Twitter’s user numbers weren’t great either, at a time when the company really needed a win. The service saw an average of 302 million monthly active users from January to March of this year, which was in line with analyst expectations. However, the company’s 241.6 million average mobile monthly active users came in slightly below estimates.
There’s more darkness on the horizon: the company cut its revenue outlook for the year to between $2.17 billion and $2.27 billion, down from a previous range of $2.3 billion to $2.35 billion.
The company’s detailed financial results are embedded below. Meanwhile, Selerity said that it sourced the earnings numbers from Twitter’s investor relations page.
Today’s $TWTR earnings release was sourced from Twitter’s Investor Relations website https://t.co/QD6138euja. No leak. No hack.
— Selerity (@Selerity) April 28, 2015
