Twitter Surpasses Revenue Estimates, Sees Improvement In Its Ad Business

Microblogging platform Twitter, on Thursday, reported revenue figures that beat the expectations of Wall Street analysts. The figures were partly due to the ad targeting improvements it rolled out to assist brands on the platform to reach new and potential customers.

Twitter has been working on its goal of doubling its annual revenue by the year 2023. The tech company has been introducing various products to help achieve its goals and stand the ever-increasing competition from rivals. Innovations like Twitter Spaces; its audio-only chat rooms and newsletter publishing have helped the platform stay on track.

The company reported revenue figures at $1.05billion which beat the expectations of Wall Street that stood at $909.9 million and was up 87 percent from last year. Shares of Twitter rose 5% to $73 in trading yesterday.

The company ad business has seen quite some improvement from the beginning of the year. Twitter has been on its heels making improvements on the effectiveness of its ads. It has included more than 2,000 new topic categories to help its users to find brands and content that they have an interest in. According to what the company told analyst on a conference call, these categories provides more ad targeting data back to Twitter.

“We get great signal about what people are most interested in, where they are or the places they care about,” said Twitter Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal during the call.

The company also mentioned that these improvement coupled with the strong demand from advertisers who seek to reach larger audience as the effects of the pandemic continues to fade off and countries continue to reopen have helped it to grow its ad revenue.

According to Ygal Arounian, a research analyst at Wedbush Securities, the impressive results from both Twitter and its tech counterpart Snap Inc. which reported quarterly revenue growth of 116% on Thursday, shows “that the overall digital ad market is on fire right now, with the reopening further strengthening advertisers’ budgets,” said Ygal Arounian, a research analyst at Wedbush Securities.

Apart from its impressive ad revenue, Twitter reported 206 million monetizable daily active users (mDAU)  for the second quarter ended June 30. The figure was quite on par with analyst targets of 205.9 million users, according to IBES data from Refinitiv.

Twitter also revealed that its user base in the United States declined by 1 million over three months from the last quarter due to a lighter news cycle in the United States but its total users worldwide count was in line with Wall Street expectations.

The company’s total revenue went up 74 percent YoY to $1.19 billion. The company’s total revenue beat analysts’ estimates of $1.07 billion.