14% Use Third Party Apps for Twitter (Which Means 40 Million Never See Ads)

Twitter released its second quarter earnings report last week to much fanfare, and rightly so, as the figures beat Wall Street expectations across the board.

The most closely-watched metric in Twitter’s report was, as usual, its monthly active users (MAUs) tally, which has now reached 271 million. However, buried deep in the presentation that accompanied the release was a worrying statistic: 14 percent of Twitter accounts log on or connect to the service via third party apps, which means that close to 40 million of its active users are never served ads.

Here’s what it says in the presentation (PDF):

“In the three months ended June 30, 2014, approximately fourteen percent of all active users used applications that have the capability to automatically contact our servers for regular updates.