User growth at all-time high under Musk: Twitter tells advertisers

SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter has told advertisers that its daily user growth has hit an “all-time high” after Elon Musk’s takeover last week, as several advertisers leave the platform amid internal chaos.

According to a company document as reported, Twitter’s monetisable daily user (mDAU) growth has accelerated to more than 20 per cent after Musk takeover.

“Twitter’s largest market, the US, is growing even more quickly,” according to the document. As per the report, Twitter has added more than 15 million mDAUs, “crossing the quarter billion mark”.

Twitter last reported 237.8 million mDAUs and a 16.6 per cent annual growth for its second quarter. The Twitter FAQ for advertisers said that “levels of hate speech remain within historical norms, representing 0.25 per cent to 0.45 per cent of tweets per day among hundreds of millions.”

Meanwhile, the Volkswagen Group joined several other companies in pausing their spending on Twitter, out of concerns that their ads could appear alongside problematic content.

Danish brewing company Carlsberg Group also said it had advised its marketing teams to do the same, according to reports. United Airlines has also suspended advertising on Twitter.

Musk said last week Twitter has seen a massive drop in revenue as activist groups were putting undue pressure on its advertisers. In a tweet, the new Twitter CEO said these activist groups are destroying free speech.

“Twitter has had a massive drop in revenue, due to activist groups pressuring advertisers, even though nothing has changed with content moderation and we did everything we could to appease the activists,” Musk said in a tweet.

“Extremely messed up! They’re trying to destroy free speech in America,” he added. The company lost $270 million in the April-June period after revenue slipped 1 per cent to $1.18 billion, reflecting advertising industry headwinds.

Advertising revenue was $1.08 billion while subscription and other revenue totalled $101 million, a decrease of 27 per cent year-over-year.