Ten years on and Twitter's yet to turn a profit, submits plan to turn things around

Founded in 2006, almost 10 years ago, Twitter is a company with more than 300 million active users and a microblogging sensation. It’s a company that needs no introduction. Despite all of this, Twitter’s mandatory 10-K filing shows that the company is yet to turn a profit and has apparently lost over $2 billion since the company’s inception. Time.com reports that Twitter lost over $500 million in 2015 alone and that analysts don’t really expect Twitter to grow its user base or serve more ads more effectively any time soon. Twitter went public in 2013, at that time still unprofitable, and haven’t been able to turn it around since. Speaking around the time of the IPO Evan Williams, former Chairman and CEO of Twitter, said that, “With Twitter, it wasn’t clear what it was. They called it a social network, they called it microblogging, but it was hard to define, because it didn’t replace anything.” While the news of Twitter’s lack of profitability might surprise many of you, those who know the space will tell you that it takes a lot of time for a company to turn a profit. Facebook for example, looked like it would break even in 2009, six years after launch. It wasn’t till 2013, just three years ago, that Facebook’s investors actually earned something from their shares. Regardless, Twitter’s growth has been very slow and the recent news comes in the wake of a series of reports on how the platform had stagnated, is unable to grow its user-base, etc. Time’s analysis of the report indicates that Twitter is going to start work on live-streaming, cracking down on abusive accounts and improve the product to demonstrate a better value to a larger user-base.