After more than a decade, the social networking platform Twitter is closing in on having a profitable quarter for the first time in its history. I'm Jonathan Strickland, and this is tech stuff Daily. Twitter is an odd thing. According to a recent shareholders call, the service boast three hundred thirty million monthly active users. These users post about five hundred million messages or tweets every day. Eight out of ten of them are accessing Twitter from mobile devices like smartphones.
About seventy of the people using Twitter are doing so outside the United States. More than half of all Twitter users are making at least fifty thousand dollars a year. The service is definitely popular. People use it, but despite that popularity, the company has yet to turn a profitable quarter. Year after year, Twitter operates at a loss. The company generates revenue, but not to cover costs. Most of that
revenue comes from advertising. According to the shareholders meeting, Twitter lost about twenty one million dollars over the third quarter of That's an enormous amount of money, but it's also a seventy nine percent drop in losses compared to the previous year, and the fourth quarter could be different. Twitter sent out a message via appropriately enough a tweet that read, if we reach our high end of our adjusted a bit DE range for Q four, we will likely be
GAP profitable. There's a lot to unpack there, so let's get to the bottom of this tweet first. You may not be familiar with the term a bit death. That initialism stands for earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization. It's a way to measure a company's performance before taking into account all the complicated financing and accounting decisions that can impact the bottom line. Then you may not know what GAP or g A a P means. That stands
for generally accepted accounting practices. So, in other words, you're talking about a pretty straightforward approach to analyzing the figures rather than putting it through some weird manipulative formula. So what that tweet was saying is that if Twitter performs closer to the upper end of their projected financial performance range in Q four, the amount they bring in before adjusting for all of that financial nonsense will be greater
than their costs. According to generally accepted accounting practices, the company will on paper at least turn a profit for the first time in its history. That history stretches back to two thousand six when Jack Dorsey got an idea while working for a podcasting company called Odeo. Dorsey had this idea for a new tech that would leverage SMS,
or short message service better known as text messages. Dorsey's idea would let people send out a text message to a group of friends rather than just a one to one communication. That way, if you wanted to give a quick update to a group of people, you could You might send out the message grabbing lunch, anyone want to join me for a taco, and you could send it out to your group of followers. From this humble idea grew Twitter. Originally, the service was so poor they couldn't
afford vowels. The original company was spelled t W T t R. But then we know from Wheel of Fortune that vowels cost two hundred fifty dollars a pop, so that would have been another five dollars they'd have to PLoP down to spell Twitter properly. All joking aside, this little experiment would end up dwarfing the failing business of Odio.
It was tough for Odio to go toe to toe with other podcasting aggregators, particularly Once Apple seriously gone involved, the founders decided to pivot and focus on this new platform called Twitter. For the first year, Twitter was pretty much an internal product being used by the developers, most of whom were racking up enormous phone bills due to the increase in text messaging they were engaged in while
using the tool. In two thousand seven, Twitter made a big splash at south By Southwest, the enormous festival in Austin, Texas that incorporates a film festival, dozens of concerts and musical performances, and interactive or tech based discussions. All in a couple of weeks. Tons of influential people from various spheres attend south By Southwest, and Twitter gained a great deal of attention. It experienced its initial growth spurt that year.
During those early years, Twitter would frequently outgrow its ability to handle traffic. The infamous fail Whale became a common site. The cartoon whale would pop up whenever Twitter service was offline, typically due to server overload. During big events such as tech conferences, sporting events, or award ceremonies, Twitter would often
struggle to stay online. Twitter retired the fail Whale in two thousand thirteen, perhaps in an optimistic move that indicated the company expected to all but eliminate downtime for the service. That's also the year the company held its initial public offering and became a publicly traded stock. During that first day of trading, the company's stock price rose at one point to see above the initial price. That's pretty impressive for a company that was still working out its business
strategy and had not yet made a profitable quarter. As of late October, the market value for Twitter is fourteen point to three billion dollars. Everyone seems to agree that Twitter is a valuable service, even in the wake of harassment scandals and public figures denouncing Twitter for failing to curtail abusive behavior of its users. But can a company really be worth billions of dollars if it can't make
enough money to be profitable. So far, the answer appears to be yes, but many analysts and journalists are keeping an eye on Twitter to see if the other shoe ever drops. To learn more about Twitter and everything else in tech, subscribe to Tech Stuff. That's my long form podcast where I dive into details behind our technological world. That's all for today. I'll see you again soon