Twitter reports 0-percent user growth… but it isn’t even close to dying

Twitter is going through a rough patch. The company released its quarterly report earlier today and despite beating Wall Street revenue expectations, the social media giant is still struggling to stimulate meaningful growth.

Contrary to analyst predictions, the microblogging service managed to rake in a revenue of $574 million during the last quarter – which is $37 million more than Wall Street anticipated and $26 million more than its first-quarter revenue. For more context, this equals to a profit of about 12 cents per share.

More worryingly though, Twitter seems to have hit the skids when it comes to user growth. The company disclosed that it currently has 328 million users. But here is the problem: this is the exact same figure it reported during the last quarter.

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Perhaps the only light at the end of the tunnel was the platform’s 12-percent growth in daily active users. But since Twitter opts not to share exact numbers for this metric, it is difficult to gauge how that converts in user engagement. So in a way, it did manage to increase revenue without growing its user base – which is on its own quite impressive.

Experts had previously chalked up the service’s dwindling revenue to its inability to attract new users over the past two years.

Meanwhile, Chinese microblogging rival Weibo has been gradually picking up momentum. In fact, the service has practically taken over Twitter in almost every department.

Last October, Weibo hit a monumental milestone when its market cap rose to $11.35 billion, marginally edging Twitter’s $11.34 billion valuation. While Twitter managed to briefly reclaim its position, Weibo eventually took the lead again in February.

Later in May, the BBC reported Weibo had accumulated a total of 340 million monthly active users in comparison to Twitter’s 328.

Since then, the Chinese rival has upped its market cap to $16.69 billion, leaving Twitter in the dust with $14.33 billion.

Still, despite ongoing struggles to curb harassment and premature obituaries, Twitter is here to stay. The truth is the platform is too valuable to be left to die.

The social media titan admittedly struggled to find buyers when it briefly considered selling out last year, but make no mistake: Should Twitter ever come to stare over the edge, businesses will be flocking to “rescue it.”