“We have a small internal team which is looking at opportunities in terms of how we might harness this change towards benefiting creators on our service, towards benefiting all consumers on Twitter,” he said. “On Web3, I think it’s very interesting what we’ve seen. I think it’s important as we sort of look at the opportunity ahead of us to think about the secular trends all around us.”
He said the broader crypto ecosystem, which includes cryptocurrency, DeFi projects, and all the decentralized technology and applications being built on top of the biggest blockchains show an incredible amount of developer energy, the kind that is keen on solving problems.
“It creates opportunities for a service like ours, which is operating at scale with a lot of customers and which happens to be the place where this entire ecosystem goes to find out what’s happening across the ecosystem to really be connected to sort of how this secular trend is evolving over time,” he said on his first earnings call as CEO after its founder and CEO Jack Dorsey stepped down.
The company reported that annual revenue growth rose 37% to touch $5.08 billion while its Average Monetizable Daily Active Usage (mDAU) growth went up 13% to 217 Million in the quarter ended December. The micro-blogging platform said it is banking on acceleration in daily active users in the US and international markets to fuel its goal of touching $7.5 billion or more for the upcoming year.
“The acceleration that we expect to see over the course of this year in the US and international is core to the revenue opportunity because it gives us a larger audience to show better ads,” Ned Segal, Twitter’s Chief Financial Officer said. “We’ve done a lot of hard work around our performance ads, we’ve also delivered excellent growth in brand, which has been our strength historically, is paying off. And we expect to see performance ads grow faster than brands over the course of this year.”
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Total revenue for the quarter grew 22% year-over-year to $1.57 billion. mDAU grew 13% year over year to 217 million and U.S. mDAU grew 1 million sequentially, the company said. During the quarter, it continued to make progress across its portfolio of consumer and revenue products.
Meta last week reported the first-ever quarter-to-quarter drop in daily active users in its history.
Advertising revenue totaled $1.41 billion, up 22% year over year or 24% on a constant currency basis but total ad engagements decreased 12% year over year. The cost per engagement (CPE) increased 39% year over year. The company said US revenue totaled $885 million, an increase of 21% year over year while International revenue totaled $683 million, an increase of 23% year over year or 26% on a constant currency basis.
The company also said it repurchased $266 million of stock via its share repurchase program that had been announced in 2020, bringing its total repurchase to $1.18 billion to date. Segal said a new $4 billion share repurchase program replaces the balance of approximately $819 million from the company’s prior $2 billion authorization. “As part of the new program, we intend to enter into a $2 billion accelerated share repurchase program and plan to repurchase the remaining $2 billion over time,” he said.
