Listening to the doom’s day predictions about the future of Twitter, the world would wake up one day to the scary thought of a world without Twitter. Because, while we were sleeping, Twitter quietly passed on; #RIPTwitter had become reality. Talk about the demise of Twitter gained traction about two years ago. Ironically, it was Twitter’s most iconic feature, the hashtag, that made that prediction viral. #RIPTwitter quickly became popular among Twitter users when it was coined as a prank. Today, #RIPTwitter is not just a prank anymore. Some people stake their reputation on it happening sooner or later. While some claimed it has already happened. What the world is seeing now, they claimed, is a walking dead business. For a while last year it almost came to pass. At least officially. More on that later. For now, the question is, what prompted people to predict the end of the social networking site, now branded as a ‘news’ app on Apple’s iTunes? The short answer is not too complicated: the numbers showed Twitter had flat-lined in all the important indices that makes the business model a viable concern going forward. Twitter by the numbers 1. Twitter has just over 300 million subscribers or users. That is not a bad number by any standard. But that number is a bit misleading. A large chunk of the people that make up that number are not active. And to be honest, the 300 million mark was reached about 3 years ago. That meant for the past 3 years, Twitter has not added any significant number of users to its subscriber base. It has effectively stagnated. 2. A few years after Twitter was created, it was Facebook’s biggest rival. At the time, some analysts even swore that Twitter would soon surpass Facebook. The numbers since then, show otherwise. Facebook has grown to over 1.5 billion subscribers since those heady days. 3. Even Snapchat, founded about 6 years ago has surpassed Twitter in the number of daily users. 4. The financial results, the bottom line, doesn’t tell a better story about the health of Twitter. The latest financial quarterly results show that Twitter made a loss of about $167 million. A year earlier the loss was $90 million. Clearly indicating the business is making less and less money each year. For greater perspective, the latest results made it the tenth successive quarter Twitter would be posting a net loss. Since these numbers didn’t happen suddenly to Twitter, what was done to stop the business hemorrhaging money so badly?