Twitter Experiences Increase In Users Since CEO Parag Agrawal Took Office, But...

JAKARTA - Since the arrival of the new CEO, Parag Agrawal, Twitter continues to experience an increase in daily users. But his earnings barely missed forecasts in the last three months of 2021.

In its fourth-quarter (Q4) 2021 earnings call, Twitter said about 217 million users saw incoming ads to the social media each day in Q4, a 13 percent jump over the previous year in the same period.

Even so, Twitter's user count was about 1 million lower than analyst expectations, but still higher than the third quarter when the company reported 211 million daily active users.

"My focus is on improving our execution. (Along with the increased focus on internal accountability) I bring a strong urgency to this role, very focused on metrics and being able to understand what works for our customers and what doesn't work for our customers," said Agrawal.

Agrawal believes that Twitter is now on track to achieve its ambitious goal of US$7.5 billion in annual revenue and 315 million daily users by 2023. Twitter's overall revenue in 2021 will be USD 5.08 billion.

However, this report was more difficult than expected when Agrawal took office. In Q4, Twitter amassed $1.57 billion in revenue, only slightly short of expectations of $1.6 billion.

According to a Reuters survey, for Q1 2022, Twitter expects $1.17 billion to $1.27 billion in revenue. Analysts were on average expecting $1.26 billion.

Cited from CNET, Friday, February 11, Twitter is not the only one experiencing this, last week the head of Facebook's parent, Meta revealed disappointing revenue but almost steady growth in its users. The report prompted investors to cut more than a quarter on its market valuation.

For the first time in its history, Facebook's daily active users fell. The company had 1.93 billion daily users in the fourth quarter, down slightly from 1.92 billion users in the third quarter.

Furthermore, much like Meta, Twitter faces challenges driven by changes to Apple's privacy policy that make it harder for advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. Apple's feature asks iPhone and iPad users to grant permission to apps that want to track them.

Meta partly blamed Apple's shift for disappointing fourth-quarter earnings. However, Twitter did not stay silent. He has experimented with features that allow him to generate revenue outside of advertising, which makes up the bulk of his income.

For example, launching a new subscription service called Twitter Blue, which will allow people access to undo tweets and read ad-free news articles for $3 per month.

Agrawal indicated that early Twitter Blue users had responded well, but the company had a long way to go.

"This is a very small part of where we are today. It's not important how we deliver $7.5 billion in revenue in 2023 but it creates huge opportunities for us as we move beyond that," Agrawal said.