The error could put Twitter in even a more precarious situation with regard to its advertisers. The company in Q3 2017 admitted it had overcounted its MAUs by 1 to 2 million, at a time when its MAU base was over 300 million. This is not the first time Twitter reported erroneous metrics around users, but it is the first time it’s impacted Twitter since the switch to mDAUs. But it’s clear Twitter still had far to go to make those investments pay off, not only in dollars and cents, but also in attracting newcomers to the network. Twitter believed it could get there by way of its new product developments, many of which were monetizable - like Super Follow subscriptions, ticketed Twitter Spaces, and the premium subscription service Twitter Blue. That mDAU goal would have represented a roughly 20% compound annual growth rate from its base of 152 million mDAUs reported in Q4 2019. However, the company had set a lofty goal of reaching 315 million mDAUs by 2023 alongside a doubling of revenue. In fact, user growth had been such a thorn in its side that it had invented that new metric to better hide its issues in the first place.ĭespite the adjustment, Twitter ended the quarter with a presumably now accurate 229 million mDAUs, up 15.9% from the same time last year, and topping analyst estimates of 226.9 million. But it does matter more on a service as small as Twitter that has historically struggled with flat user growth. Such an adjustment would barely be a blip to a rival social network like Facebook - Meta just reported its family of applications saw 2.87 billion daily active users in Q1 2022, for example, and Facebook alone saw 1.96 billion. (The company noted the recast data was not available prior to Q4 2020 due to its data retention policies, but said its estimates suggested the prior period adjustments would not be greater than those seen in Q4 2020.)Īs you can tell by the chart, as Twitter’s overall user base slowly grew, so did the overcounting - ending with an overstatement of nearly 2 million more mDAUs than the company actually had. Its findings indicated it was overstating mDAUs by anywhere from 1.4 million to as much as 1.9 million, depending on the quarter. Twitter says it re-ran the numbers for the mDAU metric for the past quarters where it had found it had been overcounting, and adjusted the totals. And since advertising continues to fuel Twitter’s business, accounting for the majority of its revenue, it was an important metric in terms of Twitter’s health. This metric was meant to give advertisers a better idea of how many people on Twitter were eligible to be targeted with their marketing messages within a given time frame. It noted, however, that the metric would not be comparable to similar daily active user disclosures from other companies, as they would often use a more expansive metric that included users who were not seeing ads. Instead, it said the mDAU metric would represent users who logged in and accessed Twitter on any given day through its website and applications and who were able to view its ads. Twitter came up with the idea after struggling to show growth through measurements of monthly active users on a quarterly basis. The mDAU metric was already a self-invented, non-standard way of measuring users on the service. With Musk’s deal in the wings, Twitter reports Q1 sales of $1.2B diluted EPS of $0.61 due to a MoPub bump
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