Twitter exceeds expectations with revenue of $787 million

0

Twitter has announced Q1 2019 revenues of $787 million — a year-on-year (YoY) increase of 18%. However, after reporting record $909 million income last quarter, this represents a quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) decrease of around 14%.

Twitter did caution shareholders during its previous earnings call that it expected its revenues to drop significantly to between $715 million and $775 million due to rising expenses, and Wall Street analysts had recently estimated that Twitter would hit $773.7 million. So today’s news sees Twitter beat expectations.

The perennial sticking point for Twitter, of course, has been its user growth. With that in mind, the San Francisco-based social network has reported that its monthly active users (MAUs) grew to 330 million, up from 321 million during the previous quarter. It’s worth noting here that this is actually the last quarter that Twitter will report its MAUs — during its Q4 2018 earnings in February, the company announced that it would instead focus on its “monetizable daily active users (mDAUs),” which it defines as those who log in to Twitter through twitter.com or its various applications that are able to show advertisements.

Indeed, Twitter previously revealed that mDAUs grew throughout 2018 from 120 million to 126 million, and today it reported that this figure had grown to 134 million for Q1 2019. And this is why Twitter has chosen to switch its user growth metric. If Twitter’s MAUs had been in rapid ascent, it’s unlikely Twitter would have made changed — but the fact is, the MAU figure fell from 336 million to 321 million over the 12 month period leading to December 2018. Even though its MAU figure has now risen again in Q1 2019 to 330 million, it’s clearly a figure that is much more volatile.

Editor’s Picks  Loy Excellentia Initiative Celebrates Black History Month in Canada

 

 Samson Oyedeyi