Twitter Q1 2022 Revenue Rises 16% in Its Last Pre-Elon Musk Reporting Period

In what could be one of its final quarters as a publicly traded company, Twitter reported revenue of $1.2 billion for the first three months of 2022, up 16% versus the first quarter of 2021. Twitter said Monday that it officially entered into an agreement to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by mega-entrepreneur Elon Musk, with the transaction valued at approximately $44 billion, or $54.20 per share in cash. Once the deal closes, it will become a privately held company. As a result of the pending transaction, Twitter will not provide any forward-looking guidance, and it is withdrawing any previously provided goals and forecasts. It also opted to not hold a conference call or release a letter to shareholders, referring people to its upcoming Form 10-Q to be filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Initial news of Musk’s purchase of a 9.2% stake in the company did not break until April 4, despite the transaction taking place March 14, so Twitter's first-quarter results were unaffected by the chaos. Revenue from advertising rose 23% year-over-year, reaching $1.11 billion, a significant chunk of its overall. Subscription and other revenue, a much smaller slice, fell 31% over the same time period, to $94 million. The company did not provide any details on its Twitter Blue subscription service. Similarweb senior insights manager David F. Carr noted that visits to ads.twitter.com rose just 3.5% year-over-year in the first quarter, according to his company’s estimates, after seeing increases of 9% in the fourth quarter of 2021 ad 16% in the third quarter. He added that on a historical basis, Twitter ad revenues have fluctuated up and down tracking traffic to its ads site on roughly a three-month lag. As for other social platforms, Carr said traffic to LinkedIn’s ad portal rose just 1.3% year-over-year, but Facebook saw a 22% gain and TikTok shot up by nearly 200%. According to the social network, it tallied 229 million average monetizable daily active users at the end of the first quarter, up 15.9% year-over-year, with 39.6 million in the U.S. (up 6.4%) and 189.4 million internationally (up 18.1%). Twitter also explained a revision to its mDAU figures from the first quarter of 2019 through the fourth quarter of last year, saying in a statement, “In March 2019, we launched a feature that allowed people to link multiple separate accounts together in order to conveniently switch between accounts. An error was made at that time, such that actions taken via the primary account resulted in all linked accounts being counted as mDAU.” Twitter reported net income of $513 million for the quarter, which included a pretax gain of $970 million from its sale of MoPub to AppLovin for $1.05 billion, finalized in early January and income taxes related to the resulting gain of $331 million. The company’s net income was $68 million in the first quarter of last year. The company shared adjusted totals for the past five quarters: 190.9 million in the fourth quarter of 2020, down from 192.3 million; 197.6 million from 199.3 million, respectively, in the first quarter of 2021; 204 million from 205.7 million in the second quarter; 209.3 million from 211 million in the third quarter; and 214.7 million from 216.6 million in the fourth quarter.