Disappearing act: Twitter reports flatlining user growth

Dorsey reiterated Twitter‘s commitment to fix replies on an earnings call this afternoon.

The company’s stock ($TWTR) stock wasup 4 percent at market close, but collapsed in after-hours trading, falling at one point as 7.5 percent. That’s certainly a lot better than Facebook’s algorithmically sorted news feed, but may not make hardcore Twitter users happy.

The company said it had 320 million total users by the end of 2015, up 9% from a year prior, but exactly the same as it was three months earlier.

The stock has plunged nearly 70 per cent in the previous year as investors worry about the company’s slowing growth in its user base.

The tweaked format aims to inject new life into the struggling one-to-many messaging service by moving away from a pure chronological timeline to one determined by algorithm, as used by social network leader Facebook.

Social media giant Twitter reported a flat Q4 in terms of user growth with monthly active users static at 320m on Q3. Presumably, the investor freakout will be a tad more severe if the promise doesn’t come true next quarter. Twitter, however, attracts just 316 million active users every month.

If you were on Twitter on Saturday, you may have learned that Twitter is implementing a change to its timeline that will show tweets out of order; it intends to show you tweets that are “relevant” instead of tweets that are recent. A string of high-level executive departures at the beginning of this year, including its vice presidents of product and engineering, has stymied his efforts to kick-start growth at the $10 billion company. It also said it will focus on removing and refining some rules that create confusion for new visitors to the platform and inhibit growth.

In the fourth quarter, Twitter generated $710 million in revenue, an increase of 48% year-over-year, in line with analyst estimates.

Twitter forecast that it would make between $595 million and $610 million in revenue for its next quarter, which is Q1. Excluding certain expenses, Twitter earned 16 cents per share during that period, surpassing the expected earnings of 12 cents per share. “Many users follow people for their tweets on specific topics and aren’t interested in other tweets from the same people…” “In addition, Twitter remains hard to use relative to its peers, and a solution does not appear to be imminent”.