http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/technology/twitter-user-growth-quarterly-earnings.html 2014-10-27 22:51:26 Twitter Attracts Fewer New Users Than in First Half of Year Revenue Increased and surpassed Wall Street expectations, but Twitter is still losing money. === SAN FRANCISCO — Dick Costolo, Twitter Usage of the service by existing customers has also stalled, with the average user pulling up his or her Twitter feed slightly less frequently than during the previous quarter. That suggests that recent changes made to the service, including an overhaul of the new user experience that was rolled out earlier this year around the World Cup soccer tournament, have yet to produce great benefits to the company. Twitter’s stock plunged about 10 percent immediately in after-hours trading in the minutes after the results came out. In regular trading earlier in the day, shares fell 2.8 percent, to close at $48.56. Twitter also raised its financial projections for the fourth quarter, projecting revenue in the range of $440 million to $450 million and adjusted profits of $100 million to $105 million. Mr. Costolo said that growth would take time. “I’m confident in our ability to build the largest daily audience in the world over time, by strengthening the core, reducing barriers to consumption and building new apps and services,” he said in a statement. Twitter’s revenue, most of which comes from advertising, increased sharply in the third quarter. Revenue more than doubled to $361.3 million, compared with $168.6 million a year ago, exceeding Wall Street’s projection of $352 million. The company said it collected $1.77 in ad revenue per 1,000 users, its highest level ever and up 83 percent from last year’s third quarter. Twitter recently expanded its options for marketers to buy video ads and ads inside other companies’ mobile applications. The social network is still losing money as it spends hundred of millions of dollars on stock compensation for its rapidly growing employment base. In the third quarter, its net loss was $175.5 million, or 29 cents a share, compared with a loss of $64.6 million, or 48 cents a share in the period a year earlier. Excluding those compensation costs and certain other expenses this year, Twitter earned a profit of 1 cent a share, meeting analysts’ expectations. Twitter executives have argued that investors have focused too intently on the service’s user base. A more complete portrait, they say, comes from looking at the company’s reach beyond the core service, as its messages, or tweets, are embedded in news articles, on websites and in marketing campaigns. But in a report before the results were released, Ben Schachter, an analyst with Macquarie Securities, said that Twitter cannot yet sell ads against tweets that are seen outside the service, so those extra views provide little financial benefit.