SAN FRANCISCO/BENGALURU (Reuters) - Twitter Inc (TWTR.N) posted worse-than-expected quarterly revenue and profit on Thursday, plagued by unusually low demand over the summer and technical issues that hurt its advertising, sending its shares down about 19%.
Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal said the company’s ad platform encountered bugs, or glitches, that hindered its ability to target ads and share data with partners.
“These issues were in our control and we will work to do better,” said Segal on a call with analysts.
Twitter’s revenue rose 9% from a year earlier, but fell short of Wall Street expectations as total advertising revenue missed estimates.
Analysts tracking Twitter said the company’s financials would take at least a few more quarters to stabilize, with a quick turnaround looking increasingly unlikely.
“Not expecting a quick rebound in Twitter’s financials for at least a few quarters, as shortfall likely will carry into 2020,” said analyst Craig Huber of Huber Research Partners.
However, the social media platform managed to record a rise in daily users who see ads on the site, beating analyst estimates.
Twitter has stopped disclosing its monthly active users figures, instead reporting mDAU, a metric it created to measure users exposed on a daily basis to advertising through the site or Twitter applications that are able to show ads.
Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey said growth in monetizable daily active usage (mDAU) was driven by product improvements, including making the site easier to navigate and more proactively identifying abusive content to remove.
The company’s average mDAU hit 145 million, beating analyst expectations of 141 million, according to IBES data from Refinitiv. This alternative metric was up 17% year-over-year.
In July, Twitter launched a more personalized desktop Twitter.com as part of a
