Financially speaking, Twitter had a good final quarter of 2018: its revenues grew by 24% year-on-year to $909m, while it reported a net profit of $255m for Q4. For 2018 as a whole, Twitter’s revenues were up by 25% to $3.04bn, while it reported its first full year of net profits, moving from a loss of $108m in 2017 to a profit of $1.21bn in 2018. Hurrah for growth! But wait: what’s not growing is Twitter’s monthly-active-users (MAUs) count. It ended the year with 321 million MAUS, down five million quarter-on-quarter – and the company’s third consecutive quarter of decline in this metric.
Perhaps no surprise: Twitter will from now on stop reporting its MAUs, focusing instead on a new metric: ‘monetisable daily active usage’ (or mDAU). Twitter says it has 126 million of those users – this metric excludes people using Twitter through third-party apps that don’t show ads. Cue every tech site rushing to compare the figure with Snapchat’s daily active users (186 million at the end of 2018), so it doesn’t seem the metrics-switch is entirely positive for Twitter.
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Tools: Kaiber
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