Twitter’s proposed
transaction with Elon Musk for the acquisition of the company is still pending
and for that reason, it has decided to withhold financial guidance in
conjunction with its first quarter 2022 earnings release. As stated by Twitter,
it will not be hosting a conference call or issuing a shareholder letter either,
for the same reason.
Twitter has,
however, revealed its quarterly financial performance for the quarter ended
March 31, 2022, but without graphics. The report only shows the data in numbers
and text.
As per the
analysis, Twitter’s daily active user count can be seen to have reached 229
million, which was at 217 million in Q4 of 2021. Compared to the company’s last
two performance reports, the current growth in its daily actives seems considerable.
It is also important to note that Twitter mistakenly overestimated its mDAU count from Q1’19 through Q4’21, as a result of allowing users to link multiple separate accounts together, which caused all linked accounts to be counted as mDAUs.
As for its performance revenue-wise, the company has seen only a
16% year-over-year increase, which reflects lack of any significant change. While the war
situation between Russia and Ukraine and consequently, Twitter being banned in Russia, could have accounted for that, it looks like Twitter has not been able to achieve as much as it had hoped to.
However, on the subscription and other revenue front,
Twitter has seen a decline by 31% year-over-year. This could mean that contrary
to Twitter’s hopes of making Twitter Blue a supplementary income stream, the feature
has not been successful in gaining users’ attention as much.
Conclusively, Twitter’s efforts for enhancing its products
haven’t really made much of a difference, although the company continues to see
a rise in the number of users. Perhaps instead of focusing on adding newer
features, Twitter could improve its algorithms so as to make the tweet
experience more engaging, which is what remains exclusive to Twitter and valuable
to its users.
