Has Twitter Reached Its Natural Growth Limit?

For the last time, Twitter publicly disclosed its monthly active user count on Tuesday, revealing that an average of 330 million people a month used its service in the first quarter of 2019. While that's a slight improvement compared to the previous two quarters, it still marks a net loss of six million users compared to the same period of 2018. Over the past three years, Twitter has now added just 20 million monthly active users, with its user count hovering around 330 million for the better part of that period, indicating that the platform may have reached its growth limit.

To address the problem at hand, Twitter is taking a page out of Apple’s playbook. Just like the iPhone-maker will no longer reveal unit sales figures for its products, presumably because they don't look as impressive as they used to, Twitter will simply stop reporting monthly active users going forward, presumably to avoid uncomfortable questions about its lackluster growth.

Going forward, Twitter will focus on "monetizable daily active users", a metric that includes all users who access Twitter on any given day on a platform/application that is able to show ads. The company warns that this metric is "not necessarily calculated in the same manner or comparable to similarly-titled measures presented by other companies", preemptively striking down any unfavorable comparisons with competing services.