“Our efforts to improve health have delivered important results. We enter this year confident that we will continue to deliver strong performance by focusing on making Twitter a healthier and more conversational service.”
A pattern?
The recent report by Twitter admitting a dip in their monthly active accounts is not the first of its type. Twitter has been reporting a loss of active users consecutively for the last three quarters. After losing another five million users in the last part of 2018, Twitter is at its lowest number of active users in two years. Twitter also announced a change in policy. They will continue to disclose their active daily users but not their active monthly users. The new policy will go into effect in the second quarter of 2019. The logic behind this decision is understandable. Facebook recently reported a gain of 49 million active monthly users and has consistently reported a gain in this number with only a few exceptions. Twitter, on the other hand, has only been reporting losses for the past three quarters. Moreover, the gains that did happen were slow. By hiding this statistic from public display, Twitter can prevent a comparison that could hurt its reputation. Also, the daily user count has increased from 115 million last year to 126 million now. Twitter has brought its own twist to this comparison as well. Twitter has announced a new internet metric which they are calling mDAUs or monetizable daily active users. However, several other social media platforms do not use third-party apps as frequently as Twitter. Some, such as Shira Ovide, the tech columnist for Bloomberg, have said it is not a useful metric for comparison."Monetizable DAUs" — the worst internet metric by far — are 126 million. Twitter says this is not comparable to other companies' DAU numbers so I won't say that Snapchat has 186 million DAUs
— Shira Ovide (@ShiraOvide) February 7, 2019
Share Your Thoughts