RBC's Mark Mahaney Dissects Twitter's Earnings

“I think what tells you more about its future is just what happened with the numbers last night and the stock last night,” Mahaney said.

“Look, there’s still a user-engagement problem at the company – a challenge given the lofty expectations at the management team that Dick [Costolo] himself has laid out.”

“They should grow the user base faster. They may well do that with all the product changes; that’s still to be determined, but the monetization levels, the ramping is great.”

“It’s still a bit of a mystery,” Mahaney replied.

“It’s a ton of disclosures other than they have said [in] these deals. It’s a little disappointing that they announced the

deal without any details and then say it’s still several months away. Our sense is that the final deals haven’t been locked down.”

“In the past, you would have called that a 'Tupperware' deal. I am not going to do that, I am just mentioning it.”

He continued, “But those other deals, look, Twitter has a huge platform, there’s a lot of people who would like some of that traffic, there should be off-Twitter opportunities, monetization opportunities, and they should be able to tap them. But not nearly subtractive, however, is generating that revenue right on Twitter itself. That’s what going to really move the fundamentals longterm.”