Twitter ad revenue up 23% to $791 million in Q4 2018

Source: Twitter

Twitter released its fourth quarter earnings release on Thursday, reporting total revenue for last quarter of $909 million, up 23 percent year-over-year, and more than $3 billion for the year. Ad revenue reached a total of $791 million during the fourth quarter, with $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 monetized 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.

Why you should care

“The platform is seeming ever more attractive to 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?” says Rakuten Marketing’s managing director for EMEA, Anthony Capano.

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.”

More on Twitter’s earnings release

• Twitter’s $909 million fourth quarter revenue represented a 24 percent increase year-over-year. The total $791 million in ad revenue reflected a 23 percent year-over-year increase.
• During the fourth quarter of 2018, Twitter earned a total of $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.