Twitter achieves World Cup goals – Q2 revenues surge 124pc to US$312m

30 Jul 2014

Citing the World Cup experience as a vital proving ground, Twitter’s second-quarter revenues rose 124pc to US$312m. The social network has also acquired deep-learning computer vision company Madbits.

Twitter reported user growth increased 24pc to 271m members.

The company’s net loss widened, however, to US$144.6m.

Twitter added 16m monthly users in the second quarter. Analysts on average were expecting 12m.

“We remain focused on driving increased user growth and engagement, and by developing new product experiences, like the one we built around the World Cup, we believe we can extend Twitter’s appeal to an even broader audience,” Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said.

Twitter advertising revenue jumped 129pc year-over-year to US$277m. Mobile ad revenue amounted to 81pc of total ad revenue.

The company reported international revenue of US$102m, up 168pc year-over-year.

International revenue generated 33pc of total revenue.

Twitter said the increase of 16m users is the highest number of net new user additions in five quarters.

The strong results sent shares in Twitter surging 35pc in subsequent trading.

Madbits acquisition

Twitter has also acquired a start-up called Madbits, founded by Clement Farabet and Louis-Alexandre Etezad-Heydari.

The acquisition could give Twitter the power to analyse and build revenue opportunities around themes of images published on Twitter every day.

“Over this past year, we’ve built visual intelligence technology that automatically understands, organises and extracts relevant information from raw media,” Madbits said on its website.

“Understanding the content of an image, whether or not there are tags associated with that image, is a complex challenge. We developed our technology based on deep learning, an approach to statistical machine learning that involves stacking simple projections to form powerful hierarchical models of a signal.

“We prototyped and tested about 10 different applications, and as we’ve prepared to launch publicly, we’ve decided to bring the technology to Twitter, a company that shares our ambitions and vision and will help us scale this technology.”

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John Kennedy is a journalist who served as editor of Silicon Republic for 17 years

editorial@siliconrepublic.com