For the same period, Twitter sales fell by $47 million, to $548 million.
Put another way, of the roughly $32 billion in sales that the three rivals are expected to have posted for the quarter, Twitter’s share of it was less than 2 percent, and falling.
While that was enough to goose the company’s beaten down shares, today’s trading looks more like a relief rally triggered by a belief that the numbers could have been worse.
But the revenue number shows that Twitter — supposedly a growth company — has a tiny and shrinking share of its primary market.
And despite today’s gains, the stock has been trading below $20 a share for all of 2017 — well below its 2013 IPO price of $26.
Maybe that’s because the per-share earnings estimates of analysts that Wall Street topped Wednesday morning exclude the cost of employee stock options, which Twitter has been doling out liberally for years to attract workers.
Including those expenses, Twitter — unlike Alphabet and Facebook — continues to post quarterly net losses.
The story of Twitter has been one of missed opportunities to make money off its daily users, even though they now number 319 million.
For all its talk of a rise in “engagement” during the first quarter, sales — a much more transparent measure of its business — dropped.
A few more quarters of this trend and Twitter’s sales risk becoming a mere rounding error in the budgets of online ad buyers.
Tech investors who want to participate in this burgeoning business should know that Twitter’s slice of it is becoming ever-thinner.
Watch: Twitter beats, reports stronger user numbers
