Ouch: eMarketer slashes Twitter revenue forecast

Social media remains a huge area of growth, but Twitter has started to trend in the wrong direction.

The social platform is now expected to bring in $2.61 billion in worldwide ad revenues this year, according to a revised forecast from eMarketer, down from the $2.95 billion the company projected in third quarter of last year.

Twitter still has a substantial user base, 291.0 million worldwide. In the U.S., 56.8 million people use Twitter at least once a month, including 31 percent of social network users and 21 percent of all internet users.

But Twitter is struggling to attract new users. eMarketer has chopped its forecast for growth in users age 12-24 and 65-plus, and that translates into 800,000 fewer users than its previous forecast of 57.6 million.

Twitter’s suffering because young people just don’t think it’s that cool anymore.

“The rise of newer social services like Instagram and Snapchat, as well as the growing popularity of chat apps, has slowed Twitter uptake among younger social network users,” the report reads.

And when user growth stagnates, advertising tends to follow.

By 2020 eMarketer predicts Twitter will have 70.7 million U.S. users, No. 3 among social networks behind Facebook (177.5 million) and Instagram (116.3 million).

Tags: instagram, snapchat, social media, twitter, twitter ads, twitter advertising