Twitter
TWTR
recently announced the acquisition of Breaker, a social broadcasting application. Consequently, the podcasting application’s services will shut down on Jan 15, 2021, as per Breaker’s blog. The financial details of the deal remained undisclosed.
The Breaker application provides features such as liking and commenting on podcast episodes, sharing the shows on social media platforms, discovering new podcasts by following friends and more.
Until the shutdown of the application, Breaker’s users can transfer Outline Processor Markup Language (OPML) files to other podcasting applications. The applications recommended by Breaker to serve as an alternative are
Apple
AAPL
, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Pocket Casts and Castro.
Notably, in addition to the podcast content, Twitter gains access to Breaker’s team, which will provide assistance to build Twitter Spaces, the former’s new audio-based social networking project.
Adding New Product Capabilities Through Buyouts
Twitter’s shares have surged 72.3% over the past year compared with the Zacks
Internet – Software
industry’s growth of 98.3%.
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The company has added several new features to boost the expansion of its product portfolio and drive user engagement on its platform. Notably, the acquisition of Breaker helps Twitter enhance public conversations on its platform with audio communication.
Moreover, the integration bodes well for Twitter Spaces. The new product, which entered beta testing in December 2020, facilitates real-time chatting for Twitter users where they could use their voice instead of a text to communicate. The company is currently trying to fix several technical issues and bugs related to the new feature.
Additionally, earlier in December 2020, this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company acquired a screen-sharing social application, Squad. It facilitated screen-sharing on mobile or desktop and allowed its users to video chat simultaneously. You can see
the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here
.
The Squad application, which was shut down post the announcement, is expected to be integrated with the core Twitter application, thereby driving the expansion of its product bandwidth. Also, Twitter widened its employee base by incorporating Squad’s employees into its design, engineering and product departments.
Intense Competition to Hurt Prospects
Twitter’s short-lived text, photos or videos feature, Fleets, launched in November 2020, faces strong competition from similar features in other social media applications such as
Snap
’s
SNAP
Snapchat,
Facebook
FB
, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and WhatsApp.
These social media applications are constantly in rivalry with each other to attract new customers with innovative product features in the bid to bolster their user growth.
Markedly, in the third quarter of 2020, Facebook’s monthly active users (MAUs) were 2.74 billion, reflecting growth of 11.9% year over year, and its Daily Active Users (DAUs) were 1.82 billion, which increased 12.1% year over year.
Moreover, Snap’s DAUs at the end of third quarter 2020 were 249 million. It added 39 million DAUs, an 18% increase year over year and 11 million, sequentially. It benefits from improved user engagement on Snapchat across both iOS and Android platforms.
Nevertheless, Twitter’s result reflected strong growth in monetizable daily average users (mDAU) which grew 1 million sequentially and increased 29% year over year, to 187 million, in third-quarter 2020. The performance was primarily driven by increased conversations on Twitter concerning current global events.
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