Twitter's monthly active users are growing again — but only just.
The company reported 271 million monthly active users (MAUs) across Q2. Some sources, and a bunch of Wall Street analysts, believed percentage growth in MAUs would decline to around 260 million. That expectation was blown out of the water today.
The new number shows that MAUs grew by 6% sequentially, roughly the same percentage number they grew by in Q1. The previous quarter, growth declined as low as 4%.
So growth is mostly flat, not up.
But as people were expecting Twitter's MAU growth to decline, flat is the new up!
Here is what that looks like in a chart:
Most observers attribute the new growth to increased activity on the platform due to the World Cup. The planet's largest sporting event could not have been better timed for Twitter. Half of it occurred in June, and the other half in July — meaning half of it occurred in Q2, and the other half in Q3.
So expect to see that World Cup bump show up in Twitter's Q3 numbers, also. Twitter now has several months to figure out how to keep that growth going through Q4.
Regardless, CEO Dick Costolo deserves a victory lap: Turning around a social media platform that was this-close to going into decline is not a small achievement. He told CNBC the uptick was attributable to "product changes that have driven new user growth. Live events drive more engagement from active users."
He denied the bump was solely about the World Cup, though: "[There was] no one moment or one time that affected growth in users. The combination of product changes that are starting to deliver results we wanted. ... World Cup drove engagement."
Disclosure: Author Jim Edwards owns Twitter stock.
