Twitter User Growth Slows in Q4, Stock Plummets 12%

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Twitter goes public on Nov. 7, 2013.

By Seth Fiegerman2014-02-05 21:25:24 UTC

Twitter turned a surprise profit and handily beat Wall Street estimates for revenue, but missed estimates for users on its first quarterly earnings report since going public in November.

Twitter reported earnings of $0.02 a share on revenue of $242.7 million, coming in ahead of estimates for revenue of $217.82 million and a net loss of $0.02 a share. For the 2013 year overall, Twitter generated revenue of about $665 million, more than double what it generated in the previous year.

See also: Will Twitter Be the Last Big Social Media IPO?

However, Twitter reported having 241 million monthly active users at the end of the December quarter, an increase of just nine million from the previous quarter.

Timeline views, Twitter's metric for engagement, increased year-over-year, but declined from the previous quarter.

Since the company went public, the stock has skyrocketed, hitting a high of more than $74 a share in December, or nearly triple its IPO price, driven by new ad targeting tools and optimism for the social media space in general.

The stock initially surged by as much as 8% in after-hours trading following the earnings report, but quickly turned negative on the user numbers, declining by as much as 12%..

Topics: Business, stocks, Twitter, twitter ipo