Twitter celebrates its XNUMXth birthday today. For the occasion, the social network created by Jack Dorsey has launched the hashtag #LoveTwitter (followed by the drawing of a little heart and the logo of the bird), obviously at the top of the trending topics. “Leaving Australia on March 21 and traveling around the world, we thank you for these 10 incredible years,” writes the company in a message.
In this decade Twitter was a broadcast channel for historic announcements. The latest in chronological order was the twitter that made known the terrorist's arrest in Brussels Salah Abdeslam, the mastermind of the Paris attacks four months ago. Sunday evening, also, the American president Barack Obama he inaugurated his historic visit to Cuba with a tweet in Spanish: “Que bola Cuba?” (How's Cuba doing?). In addition to the number one in the White House, Twitter now welcomes the major personalities from all over the world, from presidents to heads of government, up to the Pope, as well as a sea of celebrities who have hundreds of thousands of followers.
However, from an economic and industrial point of view, the 140-character social network doesn't have many reasons to celebrate. Since 2006, Twitter has not yet closed a positive balance sheet. In the fourth quarter of 2015 it achieved revenues of 710,5 million dollars, an increase of 48,3% compared to 479,1 million in the same period of 2014, but the operating result remained in the red by 90,2 million ( against 125,4 million in the last quarter of the previous year).
More than accounts, however, to worry the group is the fact that the number of active users it no longer grows: between October and December 320 million remained unchanged, as in the previous quarter. Of these, moreover, 254 million are found in the United States alone.
These are not encouraging numbers, especially considering Facebook has 1,5 billion users, Youtube a billion, WhatsApp (always from Zuckerberg) 900 million, Facebook Messenger 800 million, the Chinese QQ e WeChat 860 and 650 million respectively e Instagram 400 million. The latter social network is considered Twitter's number one competitor and in recent months has stolen a large market share from the microblogging site in terms of photo sharing and advertising revenues.
As for the trend on the stock exchange, since the day of the listing - which took place in November 2013 - the shares of Twitter has lost about half of their value.
