First quarter reports of 2019 will be Twitter’s last report that will mention the term monthly active users.
Twitter’s Q1 of 2019 earnings reports exceeded the expectations of the stock market, sending the stock rising to 15.6% on Tuesday. The surge added $4.1 billion to Twitter’s market cap, increasing it to $30.5 billion.
Twitter reported the growth in its revenue as it unveiled its recent earnings.
Twitter’s revenue report mentioned the following points:
- Twitter earnings per share adjusted to 37 cents vs. 15 cents expected by analysts.
- Twitter revenue rose to $787 million vs. $776.2 million expected by analysts.
- Twitter now has 330 million Monthly active users vs. 318 million expected by FactSet consensus. This count does not include SMS users.
Last year, Twitter reported that this would be the last quarter in which it is mentioning the monthly active users. From the coming year, the social media company will call it monetizable daily active users (mDAUs). This change is brought to give a better reflection of its audiences.
According to the company, the metric for the above change will include “Twitter users who log in and access Twitter on any given day through Twitter.com or our Twitter applications that are able to show ads.”
Aaron Goldman, CMO of 4C Insights, said,
“The first quarter is always a big one for Twitter given its role as the default second-screen for tentpole events like the Super Bowl and Oscars.”
He further added,
“The fact that performance was so strong shows that it also benefited from the outsized budget allocation in the annual planning cycle. In particular, we’re seeing great success with video on Twitter and our advertisers are adopting these formats as a core part of their cross-channel mix. For Q1 2019, we saw double-digit increases year-over-year on Twitter video ad budgets.”
Twitter announced 134 million average mDAUs in the Q1 2019 in comparison with 120 million in the past year. According to the reports, Twitter garnered 126 million mDAUs in the fourth quarter. Twitter predicts second-quarter revenue between $770 million to $830 million in comparison to analyst predictions of $783.9 million to $853.6 million in the Refinitiv survey.
Twitter is indicating the introduction of new ways to improve the experience on the platform for the well-being of the user instead of completely focusing on engagement metrics.
CEO Jack Dorsey stated in an interview with Rolling Stone that his team is considering “what happens if we remove the ‘like’ counts from tweets.”
In addition to removing the ‘like’ counts feature, the company has also released its new prototype app to improve the user experience.
