Twitter reaches 300 million active users but stock crashes after earnings leak

Twitter shares plunged Tuesday after an earnings report fell short of market expectations, despite a jump in the number of active monthly users above 300 million. Revenue during the first three months of this year was $436 million, Twitter said, but the San Francisco company had been expected to bring in about $456 million. The one-to-many messaging platform reported a net loss in the quarter of $162.4 million, as compared with a loss of $132.4 million on revenue of $250.5 million in the same period last year.

That kind of drop is really tough.

Independent analyst Rob Enderle of Enderle Group in Silicon Valley

Twitter has yet to show a quarterly profit in its publicly released earnings statements, but analysts say it may be more important for the social network to boost its user base as it moves toward profitability. Separately it announced a deal to buy marketing technology company TellApart and a partnership with Google’s DoubleClick platform to improve advertising performance.

(Growth) fell slightly short of our expectations due to lower-than-expected contribution from some of our newer direct response products.

Twitter chief executive Dick Costolo

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