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While President Trump has helped make Twitter a regular part of the national conversation, the business behind the microblogging service is not looking up. That feeling was only reinforced by the meager revenues the  company reported  on Thursday. Things look especially slow when you compare the platform to rival social media apps. As this chart from  Statista shows, after gaining hundreds of millions of users in its first few years, Twitter has only added 31 million monthly active users over the past two years. Facebook's suite of behemoths have easily surpassed that over the same time frame, while Snapchat has outpaced it as well (though it has  slowed recently , too). Now, Twitter serves a much narrower niche than Facebook, so the fact that it can't keep up makes sense. But even with that in mind, the company appears to be in a prolonged rut.

Whether to improve relevancy with their content or to keep competitors from advertising on their pages, publishers want control over the types of ads that can run on their sites. Google  announced  Tuesday that it is expanding the capability for publishers to opt out of certain ad categories and has increased the number of categories and subcategories from 250 to 470. More detailed subcategories give publishers greater refinement in blocking ads on their sites. For example, instead of blocking the category “Apparel,” you can now pick any of the new subcategories, “Sunglasses,” “Handbags” or “Watches.” The feature is now available in all AdSense markets and supports Chinese (simplified), Dutch, Polish, Russian and Turkish, in addition to English.