The social media company, Twitter, has admitted to overstating the figure of the platform’s users by 1.9 million in the last three years. The company disclosed this in its Q1 2022 financial report released today.
The revelation comes days after the board of the company accepted a $44 billion offer by Elon Musk to take over Twitter.
Twitter says an “error” introduced in Q1 2019, resulted in the overstatement of its monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU). According to the company, this went on undiscovered for three years.
What the company is saying
Twitter in its Q1 2022 earnings report said: “In March of 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.”
What you should know
- This is not the first time Twitter reported erroneous metrics around users, but it is the first time it’s impacted Twitter since the switch to mDAUs.
- The company in Q3 2017 admitted it had overcounted its MAUs by 1 to 2 million, at a time when its MAU base was over 300 million.
- The error could put Twitter in even a more precarious situation with regard to its advertisers.
- The company recorded $1.2 billion in revenues in the first quarter of 2022.
- Twitter’s monetized daily active users, its own unique metrics for tracking its audience, came in better than investors expected at 229 million (presumed to be the accurate figure after an adjustment of the past error) with year-on-year growth of 6.4 per cent in the US and 18.1 per cent in the rest of the world.
Net income jumped to $513million, thanks to a one-off benefit from the $1 billion sales of its mobile advertising unit, MoPub to AppLovin, which closed in January.
