Since Donald Trump was elected president in November, the overall stock market, and particularly tech stocks, have done pretty well, with one exception: Trump’s favorite social media service, Twitter.That was plain for all to see on Thursday, when Twitter revealed its first sales numbers since Trump took office Jan. 20— disappointing revenue and a widening loss — which sent its stock down 9 percent in midday trading. The numbers show that even though Trump puts Twitter in the headlines on a daily (sometimes hourly) basis with unfiltered missives dashed off from his Samsung Galaxy S3, it really isn’t helping Twitter much as a business.“The president’s use of Twitter has broadened the knowledge of the platform and how it can be used,” Twitter CFO Anthony Noto conceded, but “it’s very hard for a single person to drive sustained growth.”And it is hard to overstate just how badly Twitter could use the help:
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- Twitter’s net quarterly loss more than doubled, from $80 million to $167 million.
- Advertising revenue, which is almost all of Twitter’s revenue, is right about where it was in 2015: $640 million.
- Monthly active users, Twitter’s preferred metric for measuring its audience, inched up 4 percent from 305 million at the end of 2015 to 319 million at the end of 2016.