Things are looking a bit bleaker than anticipated for Twitter.
In fact, eMarketer recently decreased its estimates of the number of U.S. Twitter users ages 12 to 24 and 65 and older after analyzing new data.
“As a result, the total number of Twitter users has also been adjusted downward,” reports eMarketer. “Despite Twitter’s efforts to get more people to use the platform through features like Moments, user growth seems to have come to a near standstill.”
Lowered growth projections for Twitter ad revenue worldwide could come in at $2.61 billion — a downgrade from the $2.95 billion eMarketer projected in Q3 2015.
Twitter will generate nearly 90 percent of its revenues from mobile in 2016.
“We have yet to see material monetization of logged-out users,” said eMarketer senior forecasting analyst Martín Utreras. “Events like the U.S. election and summer Olympics this year may prove pivotal to the success of this strategy.”
The culprits? Partly the ascendancy of popular social sites like Instagram and Snapchat.
“Twitter’s U.S. user base is forecast to expand 8.0 percent this year, slightly slower growth compared with Pinterest and Tumblr, but will maintain significantly higher yearly growth rates compared with that of Facebook and the larger social networking audience through 2018,” according to eMarketer.
