By
Bhushan Akolkar
April 24th, 2024
Twitter reported its Q3 earnings and revealed that its performance was not significantly affected by Apple’s updated privacy features.
Despite Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) privacy changes which disrupted other businesses, social networking platform Twitter Inc (NYSE: TWTR) reported gains in revenue and user growth while delivering its third-quarter (Q3) earnings. In Q2, Snap Inc (NYSE: SNAP) and Facebook Inc (NASDAQ: FB) referred to the new Apple iOS privacy features as the cause for business disruption. As for Twitter, the company said the impact of the new privacy features was lower than anticipated.
Twitter Records 211M mDAU in Q3
After Twitter reported its Q3 earnings and revealed that it was not significantly affected by Apple’s updated privacy features, TWTR stock jumped 4% in after-hours trading. In the earnings report, the company recorded 1 cent per share, adjusted while analysts predicted 15 cents. Also, Twitter said its revenue for the quarter was $1.284. On the other hand, analysts had expected $1.285. Additionally, the social media platform saw its monetizable daily active users (mDAU) increase to 211 million, nearly analysts’ expectation of $211.9 million. In the previous quarter, Twitter mDAU was about 206 million from the previous quarter.
Also, Twitter reported that its ad revenue surged over 41% to $1.14 billion in Q3, including a 6% year-on-year addition in total ad engagement. According to CFO Ned Segal, Twitter’s ads were not affected by global supply chain issues, unlike Facebook and Snap.
Twitter also reported some losses during its Q3 earnings call. The company saw a net loss of $537 million or 75 cents per share. The figure includes a one-time litigation-related net charge of $766 million related to an $809 million settlement announced last month. The litigation was for allegedly misleading investors on the platform’s user growth. Due to the legal settlement, Twitter reported a net loss against the $29 million profit gathered last year.
Twitter Expects About $1.6 Billion Revenue in Q4
Earlier in October, reports showed that Twitter was selling MoPub to software company AppLovin. The deal was set at $1.05 billion and will expectedly close in the first quarter of the coming year. Twitter stated that the company does not expect to recover its full revenue loss from the sale. Instead, Twitter said it is expecting revenue to reach $1.5 billion to $1.6 billion in Q4. Meanwhile, analysts’ prediction on sales for the quarter is $1.58 billion.
CEO Jack Dorsey spoke on Twitter’s plans to lean more into personalization. He stated:
“Our greatest opportunity and potential for growth is around personalization and relevance. We intend to put a lot more emphasis here. This mainly speaks to our machine learning and general AI. But it also lends itself to the new products, services, and capabilities that we have been talking about.”
In his speech, Dorsey added that users would see more relevant advertising and more relevant tweets.
Data showed that Twitter stock pumped 19.82% in a year and an additional 13.44% gain in its year-to-date record. However, TWTR has shed 10.10% in the last three months and saw another 1.3% decline over the past month. In the last five days, the social networking service has also lost 7.08%.
