Mark your calendar for Mediaweek, October 29-30 in New York City. We’ll unpack the biggest shifts shaping the future of media—from tv to retail media to tech—and how marketers can prep to stay ahead. Register with early-bird rates before sale ends!
The tighter privacy permissions implemented by Apple in its iOS 14 operating system did not hit Twitter’s third-quarter-2021 earnings as hard as they did Facebook‘s and Snap Inc.’s.
Twitter reported total revenue of $1.28 billion in the period, up 37% versus the third quarter of 2020, saying performance was strong across all major products and geographies.
Breaking it down further, U.S. revenue of $742 million was up 45% year over year, while international revenue of $542 million was up 28% (27% on a constant currency basis). Total advertising revenue rose 41% year over year, to $1.14 billion.
Twitter said the revenue impact it experienced from Apple’s rollout of App Tracking Transparency was higher than that in the second quarter, as iOS 14.5 did not roll out until April 26, but lower than it had anticipated, and it incorporated a similarly modest impact into its guidance for the fourth quarter.
The company said it invested in supporting Apple’s SKAdNetwork, opening up over 30% more inventory on iOS, and it introduced support for SKAdNetwork’s view-through attribution and SK-campaign ID management features in Twitter Ads Manager.
The company said in its letter to shareholders, “The impact of ATT is likely to vary across ad platforms, given the unique mix of ad formats, signal and remediations on each, as well as other factors. The mitigations we have put in place, and the speed with which we have adopted new standards, like SKAdNetwork and resulting changes across our technical stack, have contributed to minimizing the impact to us.”
Twitter credited revenue product improvements, strong sales execution and increased advertiser demand for its ad revenue growth, saying total ad engagements rose 6% year over year, while cost per engagement went up 33%, driven largely by like-for-like price increase across most ad formats due to the pandemic’s impact on 2020 numbers.
Average monetizable daily active users, which is how Twitter expresses its user numbers, reached 211 million, up 13% compared with the same quarter last year and up slightly from 11% year over year growth in the second quarter.
The company cited ongoing product improvements and global conversation around current events, saying that 230 million accounts currently follow at least one Topic, and it added over 2,300 Topics during the quarter, bringing the platform’s total to 11,800 across 11 languages.
Twitter agreed earlier this month to sell mobile monetization platform MoPub to AppLovin with the aim of concentrating more of its efforts on performance-based advertising, offerings for small and midsized businesses and commerce initiatives.
The company’s revenue projection for the fourth quarter, which includes MoPub, is $1.5 billion to $1.6 billion, and it does not expect to recoup the full revenue loss associated with the sale—estimated at $200 million to $250 million—in 2022.
CEO Jack Dorsey said in a statement, “I am proud of our third quarter results. We’re improving personalization, facilitating conversation, delivering relevant news and finding new ways to help people get paid on Twitter.”
