Twitter Q3 earnings 2018 – Business Insider

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.Getty

Twitter is set to report its third-quarter earnings at 7 a.m. EDT on Thursday, before the opening bell.

Here’s what analysts are expecting:

• Adjusted earnings: $0.14 per share
• Revenue: $702.57 million

All eyes will be on Twitter’s user growth, or lack thereof. The firm reported a decline in monthly active users last quarter (down from 336 million to 335 million), and that trend will almost certainly continue in Q3.

Wall Street is pessimistic about those figures, variously predicting flat growth or declines. Analysts at SunTrust Robinson Humphrey predicted that Twitter would lose 4 million monthly users sequentially to 331 million. Twitter had been at 336 million in the first three months of 2018.

Twitter will likely maintain the view that declining monthly users is a sign of improving platform health. The company, plagued for years by accusations of enabling misogyny, racial hatred, and other abuse on its platform, has been making noises for the past 12 months about “healthy conversation.” The more human trolls and sock-puppet accounts it can kick off its platform, Twitter’s argument goes, the better.

That may prove too woolly for Wall Street, which will want to see this expensive cleanup effort translating into improvements in its ad business.

In a note Tuesday, analysts at Wedbush wrote: “Twitter appears to have its revenue growth back on track overall, and once it laps the hiccup from purging accounts, we expect the company to emerge in better overall health. It is possible that revenue growth reaccelerates when [monthly users] once again begin to grow.”