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Twitter Adds More Users, but Wall Street Wants More

The numbers are in -- and it’s not enough for the Street.

John Murrell/Recode

Twitter is still growing — but hardly fast enough for Wall Street.

Twitter reported 255 million monthly active users as of the end of March, coming in at the low end of the user growth range that Wall Street had anticipated. That’s a 5.8 percent increase from the 241 million users it had at the end of the fourth quarter, and a 25 percent increase from the year-ago quarter.

It’s a bump up, but still not enough to make investors happy. Shares of Twitter were down nearly 10 percent at $38.69 in after-hours trading.

Measure that against last year’s growth numbers and you’ll see why: That 25 percent increase is still on a decelerating curve from last quarter’s year-on-year user growth, which saw a 30 percent increase.

It’s the same story with how often people use Twitter. This quarter, timeline views saw a 15 percent year-on-year growth to 157 billion. Last quarter, year-on-year timeline view growth was at 26 percent.

On a high note: Twitter posted flat earnings on revenue of $250 million in its second quarter financial results on Tuesday, a 119 percent year-on-year increase in revenue that easily beat analysts’ expectations of a loss of three cents per share on revenue of $241 million.

But the revenue side of the house hasn’t been a huge problem for some time — Twitter’s biggest headache is getting more users to come to the site and stick around after they’ve signed up.

Another number that’s not so surprising: Twitter is still a mobile-first company, as mobile monthly users hit 198 million.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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