A symbolic moment for Twitter almost 14 years after its founding: for the first time, its quarterly revenues surpassed $1bn ($1.01bn, to be precise, an increase of 11% year-on-year). The company’s share price rose on the news, following fears that its advertising revenues were slowing down.
Twitter uses its own metric of MDAUs (monetisable daily active users) to measure its success and they were up 21% year-on-year to a record 152 million – ahead of analysts’ projections). Of those 152 million MDAUs, 121m were outside of the US.
CEO Jack Dorsey says that Twitter will become more international in terms of its structure and workforce, saying the goal is to build a company that is “not as dependent on San Francisco” as it has been.
Ad revenues at Twitter grew 12% to $885m in the period; this was after the company announced that it would no longer run paid political ads on the platform.
“In Q4, we increased our efforts to protect the integrity of election-related conversations and proactively limit the visibility of unhealthy content on Twitter, resulting in a 27% decline in bystander reports on Tweets that violate our terms of service,” it added in its letter to shareholders. The company forecast that revenues for Q1 would be between $825m and $885m.
Music Ally’s next Learn Live webinar will help you understand what’s required for artists to thrive in new international markets!