Twitter Struggles to Maintain Monetization Growth Spurt

Aside from finally breaking past the billion-dollar mark for revenue, the headline figure focused on by Twitter in its Q4 2019 earnings release was its increase in monetizable daily active usage (mDAU). The year-over-year growth rate of 21 percent represented the latest strong result in a growing trend for the social media giant. CEO Jack Dorsey commented on the improvement back then, saying: "2019 was a great year for Twitter. Our work to increase relevance and ease of use delivered 21 percent mDAU growth in Q4, with more than half of the 26 million mDAU added in 2019 directly driven by product improvements”.

Showing no lack of ambition, Twitter’s CFO Ned Segal added: “We continue to see tremendous opportunity to get the whole world to use Twitter and provide a more personalized experience across both organic and promoted content, delivering increasing value for both consumers and advertisers.” 2020 had other ideas though, and while the trend did continue up to 34 percent in Q2, the latest figures released this week mark the second consecutive quarter of slowing mDAU growth. Nevertheless, this is still growth, the latest of which brought the metric up to 192 million and "up 5 million sequentially" which has been "driven by global conversation around current events and ongoing product improvements."