Twitter faces problems in the advertising business

In the months of July to September, a net profit of 37 million dollars resulted, as Twitter announced on Thursday. This is significantly less than analysts had expected. In the same period last year, the group still came to a profit of 789 million dollars. At that time, however, it had benefited from a positive tax effect of a good 680 million dollars.

In the past quarter, sales rose by nine percent to 824 million dollars. But even with this, the Americans failed to meet the expectations of the stock exchange. In pre-market trading on Wall Street, Twitter shares subsequently slumped by around 15 percent.

Problems burden

The short messaging service suffered from a number of issues in the third quarter, including program bugs that affected the company's ability to target ads and share data with advertising partners. In addition, certain personalization and data settings did not work as expected.

In addition, Twitter suffered from a seasonal slowdown in its advertising business over the summer. Although measures have been initiated to remedy these problems, they are likely to continue to burden the advertising business in the short term, the group said.

More users

Despite the problems, Twitter was able to increase the number of daily users in the third quarter by 17 percent to 145 million within a year. The company only counts users to whom it can show ads via its website or apps.

This figure does not include users who follow tweets via other sites such as Tweetdeck. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey attributed the growth to product improvements, such as in the navigation on the Twitter site as well as in its usage options.

In the summer, Dorsey had to admit to problems with data security. Data from users without consent is said to have been "inadvertently" used for personalized advertising. (Werbewoche.ch reported). Twitter and other social media platforms have also come under pressure recently over their ad policies.

Democratic presidential candidates in the U.S., including former Vice President Joe Biden, had recently criticized the platforms for allowing ads from politicians that they believed contained false or misleading claims. (SDA)