Elon Musk questions Twitter’s ‘monetisable’ daily active user numbers

After scrapping the $44-billion Twitter deal over the presence of fake/spam accounts, Tesla chief executive officer (CEO) Elon Musk on Sunday questioned the company’s way of measuring its user base, which it uniquely calls “monetisable daily active users” (mDAUs).

In 2019, Twitter for the first time used the word mDAU, saying it believes that monetisable DAU, and its related growth, “are the best ways to measure our success”.

Monetisable DAU are users who log in and access Twitter on any given day through twitter.com or Twitter applications that are able to show ads.

Twitter says its mDAUs are not comparable to current disclosures from other companies, many of whom share a more expansive metric that includes people who are not seeing ads.

A follower asked Musk: “$TWTR changed what it considers an active user and how it counts them about 3 years ago. @Twitter developed a proprietary method (mDAU) that’s not based on any standardised industry methodology. Since then, the number of active users has been steadily increasing”.

Musk replied: “Odd” and “Indeed”.

“What I’m seeing is that after three consecutive quarters of negative growth, @Twitter decided to concoct a new way to count active users that fortuitously unearthed positive growth,” said Alex, a physics engineer who follows Musk.

In the April-June period this year, Twitter said it reached 237.8 million users – a significant growth (up 16.6% compared with Q2 of the prior year) despite posting $270 million net loss in Q2.

According to the company, their goal was “not to disclose the largest daily active user number they could”.

“We want to align our external stakeholders around one metric that reflects our goal of delivering value to people on Twitter every day and monetizing that usage,” it said.

The company also began disclosing the absolute number of average mDAU (previously referred to as DAU), for both the US and international markets, from 2019.

“Advertisers come to Twitter because we have one of the most valuable audiences when they are most receptive, and we generate a high return on investment against their campaign objectives whether they are launching a new product or connecting with what’s happening on Twitter,” according to the microblogging platform.

When Musk scrapped the deal, the microblogging platform said it was suspending more than 1 million spam accounts a day.

The new figure represented a doubling of its previous update.

Twitter CEO Parag Agarwal had said in May that spam account suspensions were running at 500,000 a day.

na/ksk/

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