It has been a mixed time for social media during July. Facebook saw its shares tumbled by more around 20 percent and the social media network’s revenue and new user growth were short of investor expectations, as Digital Journal has reported. The news also hit Mark Zuckerberg personally; although tor many of the world’s richest people, losing $16.8 billion in a day would be a wipeout. However, for Zuckerberg this was only around one-fifth of his net worth. That said, some Facebook shareholders are starting to talk of the Mark Zuckerberg being is part of the problem, in terms of the social media network returning to its glory days.
There was better news for Alphabet, where the company that owns Google earned $32.7 billion in revenue in the second quarter of 2018, which is a rise up 26 percent based on the same period last year (a subject also covered by Digital Journal). Microsoft has also done fairly well. Shares of Microsoft rose by 2.7 percent after the company reported strong growth across a variety of its business segments, as highlighted in its fourth-quarter report. With another major social media platform, Instagram is set to turn a huge profit for Facebook this year; the photo-sharing app that currently boasts over 400 million users.
This leaves the other key social media firm, Twitter, which was the last to report on its profits, coming in towards the end of July 2018. Data relating to Twitter indicates that the number of monthly active users on Twitter fell from 336 million during the first quarter 2018 down to 335 million for the second quarter of 2018. The biggest decline in users came from the U.S.
At the same time, Twitter saw its revenue increase to $711 million, which was up from $665 million last quarter. This was the micro-blogging site’s third straight profitable quarter, according to Venture Beat.
The main reason for the loss in Twitter users was through the expunging of the network of fake accounts. This was something Twitter was obliged to do under European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (see “Still worried about GDPR? Expert provides advice“).
According to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey: “We made a major shift this year in shifting more of our model and enforcement towards behavior and conduct on the platform, rather than content. That’s entirely machine learning and deep learning-driven.” Twitter reports that despite the loss of (mainly fake and inactive) users, the number of active users continues to grow.
