Should Twitter Worry About User Numbers?

Here's a weird idea: 320 million people is quite a lot of people. Bear with me.

Twitter (Swiss: TWTR.SW - news) shocked investors in its financial report, revealing that is had added exactly no new users over an entire quarter - and by some measures, even lost some. It had stalled, on 320 million users.

That sent its stock falling, hard and fast. Twitter's problem, in investors' eyes, has been adding the new users that would justify its $10bn (£7bn) stock market valuation.

When Twitter went public in 2013, it was the next big social networking hope, after Facebook (NasdaqGS: FB - news) 's initial public offering the year before.

Since then, it's not been able to escape comparisons. Today, they are stark: at 1.6 billion people, Facebook has five times as many users as Twitter and is worth 50 times as much in market capitalisation.

But here's the interesting thing. Twitter didn't add any users, but it did still increase its revenues - by a significant chunk.

It took in $710m (£489m) in the last quarter alone - up 48% year-on-year - to take its total revenue up to $2.2bn (£1.5bn), with around $558m (£384m) of that underlying profit.

Maybe only having 320 million users is OK.

It's heresy in Silicon Valley, where user growth - not revenues or profits - is the only metric that counts.

But those 320 million include the most influential people on the planet. Twitter has built a quite wonderful niche - and again, 320 million is some niche. It lets you follow anyone in the world, which Facebook does not, and so is the perfect platform for celebrities, politicians and sports people.

Twitter isn't perfect: it has problems with trolling and abuse, and it needs to make things easier for new users (if they ever sign up).

But the company also gave a strong signal that it was going to focus on what it does best, rather than chase users. In its results, Twitter announced its priorities for 2016: "Refinement of our core service; live streaming video; our creators and influencers; safety; and developers"

To me, those objectives look both clear and correct. And they don't signal a lowest common denominator bid for more users at any cost (what Silicon Valley admiringly calls "growth hacking"), but an attempt to make a better service.

The arrival of the social web in the mid-2000s held seemingly limitless promise. Facebook does indeed continue to grow without relent and won't rest until the whole world has signed up.

But perhaps with Twitter we can now see the natural limits to a large, if not dominant social network. And those limits are not the end of the world, but a profitable, interesting business (Other OTC: UBGXF - news) .