Twitter User Growth Remains Stagnant as Teens Stay Away

Twitter has about 326 million active users, according to its most recent earnings report. That sounds like a staggeringly large number, but it's going down—Twitter also reported that it lost 9 million active users (2.8 percent) in the third quarter of 2018, when it had expected to lose only 5 million. Most of that is because Twitter has been cracking down on fake accounts, which is a good thing (even if you saw your follower numbers plummet).

But as Statista notes in the chart above, with data provided by Twitter itself, it didn't hurt the company much at all. In fact, Twitter saw a 28.6-percent growth in revenue for Q3.

Nice as that is, it doesn't mean Twitter doesn't want to grow. It must, to keep up with the social Joneses. But the latest Statista Morning Brew chart shows that the monthly active user (MUA) growth at Twitter has completely stagnated for three years; the year-to-year and quarter-to-quarter growth of MUAs hasn't gone up since 2011. That's seven years—a lifetime in the world of tweets.

Can Twitter grow its user base again? If you think what teens are into are the true sign of what's cool in life then you'll probably think not.

Statista also put together this chart of data from the semi-annual survey PiperJaffray peforms of 8,000 US-based teens around the age of 16. Going back to spring 2016 and up to fall 2018, they make it clear that the only thing less cool than Twitter is Facebook (and yet, Facebook continues to add users all the time!). Teens prefer Snapchat (46 percent currently say it's their fave social network) and Instagram (32 percent, and gaining); Twitter is the preferred network of only 6 percent of the younger set. Not exactly a number that will thrill the company.