Twitter unveiled the results of its first quarter of 2022 at the end of April. The social network took the opportunity to correct an error perpetrated for 3 years in the calculation of its “monetizable” daily active users.
Twitter signs a good first quarter
The social media giant posted revenue of $1.2 billion, a 16% year-over-year increase. It is nevertheless slightly below analysts’ forecasts, which expected 1.23 billion in turnover according to Refinitiv.
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Advertising revenue brought in $1.11 billion to the company, up 23% from the first quarter of 2021. Subscriptions and other revenue channels were down 31% from a year earlier, generating at total $94 million.
The company pegged its costs and expenses at $1.33 billion at the end of the first quarter of 2021, a 35% increase from a year earlier. It announced an operating loss of 128 million dollars and posted a sad operating margin of -11%. Last year at the same time, Twitter posted an operating profit of $52 million, or a margin of 5%.
A mistake perpetrated for 3 years
In the first quarter of 2022, Twitter saw its number of “monetizable” daily active users increase by 15.9% year-on-year to 229 million. That’s above analysts’ estimates of 226.9 million. The company took advantage of its quarterly results to correct an error in the calculation of its users in recent years.
In 2019, the San Francisco-based company added a feature to make it easier to use multiple profiles on its social network. From then on, the company counted each account used by a single person as different active users. Between 1.4 and 1.9 million additional users have been added every quarter since the first quarter of 2019.
The sum of the data may not always equal the total due to rounding. Screenshot: Twitter.
Despite the correction, these figures do not influence the steady increase in the number of Twitter users. In the first quarter of 2022, it registered 39.6 million users in the United States and 189.4 million internationally. A respective increase of 6.4% and 18.1% compared to the first quarter of 2021.
With the announcement of the takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk for 44 billion dollars, these are perhaps the latest quarterly results published by the social network. The leader of SpaceX and Tesla intends to make the company private and therefore take it out of the stock market. From there, the company will no longer be obliged to publish its figures.
Twitter expects the transaction to be cleared by regulators later this year. In the meantime, she has already canceled her online conference and let it be known that she ” would no longer provide forecasts » and that she « withdrew all previously announced goals and perspectives “.