Twitter ad revenue rises 23% to USD$791 in Q4 2018

Twitter’s total revenue for the last quarter was at USD$909 million, up 23 percent year-over-year, and more than USD$3 billion for the year.

Ad revenue reached a total of USD$791 million during the fourth quarter, with USD$425 million coming from the U.S.

Ad engagements increased 33 percent year-over-year in the fourth quarter, while cost-per-engagement dropped seven percent.

The company said monetised daily active users (mDAU) have reached 126 million globally, with 27 million of those users in the U.S.

User growth remained relatively flat between the third and fourth quarters of 2018, going from 124 million to 126 million by the end of the year. Twitter saw a nine-percent year-over-year increase in mDAUs during the last quarter.

Source: Twitter

Twitter also reported monthly active users (MAU) at 321 million during the fourth quarter of 2018, which is down five million from the MAUs reported during the third quarter of 2018, and nearly 10 million less than the 330 million MAUs on the app in the last quarter of 2017.

The company says it will no longer disclose MAUs after the first quarter of 2019.

Rakuten’s marketing managing director for EMEA Anthony Capano said this makes it attractive for advertisers looking for high return on spend.

“As long as it’s in brand safe environments that have the ability to reach new and global audiences, then why not test?” he said.

Twitter entered 2018 plagued by spam and abusive content, an issue that has caused concerned among advertisers. But, CEO Jack Dorsey said during a livestream Q&A back in March that the health of the platform was his priority.

Since then, the company has made changes to how conversations happen on the app, purged a significant amount of fake accounts and continued to modify third-party app access to the platform.

“Users and advertisers alike have responded well to the steps Twitter has taken to remove fake and suspicious accounts and that should be seen in their numbers going forward,” says Socialbakers CEO Yuval Ben-Itzhak, “The fact that Twitter has decided to report monetizable daily active users is beneficial to advertisers as it’s a metric that clearly indicates the platform’s audience size and engagement.”

Here’s a summary of Twitter’s earnings.

• Twitter’s USD$909 million fourth quarter revenue represented a 24 percent increase year-over-year. The total USD$791 million in ad revenue reflected a 23 percent year-over-year increase.
• During the fourth quarter of 2018, Twitter earned a total of USD$506 million in revenue in the U.S.
• The company’s global staff grew 16 percent year-over-year, with more than 3,900 total employees by the end of 2018.

source: https://martechtoday.com