Twitter has released its latest quarterly report, revealing its monthly user count dropped by 9 million in Q3 2018.
The company’s monthly active users (MAUs) fell from 335 million to 326 million.
However, this was an expected loss, and Twitter even warned shareholders months ago that it may lose MAUs in the “mid-single-digit millions.”
That’s due to an initiative that was launched to cleanse Twitter’s user base of bots, inactive accounts, and bad actors.
In other words, Twitter has been actively removing spammy and suspicious accounts. It has also been preventing the creation of new spammy and suspicious accounts.
As the numbers show, Twitter has wiped out considerably more accounts than it has been adding.
The loss in MAUs is expected to continue, Twitter says, as the company expects to lose a similar amount of users by next quarter.
Despite its user base being on the decline, CEO Jack Dorsey believes this initiative will have a positive effect on the health of Twitter over the long-term.
Daily Active Users and Revenue Up
It wasn’t all losses in Twitter’s quarterly report, as the company reports daily active users are up 9 percent year over year.
Although, on another negative note, Twitter’s daily user base is not growing at the same pace it was last year.
Last year at this time, Twitter reported a 14 percent growth in daily active users.
Perhaps what’s most important to the health of the company, however, is that it earned enough revenue this past quarter to turn a profit.
That marks four straight quarters of profitability, which is something Twitter has not achieved before.
