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Number of Twitter daily users revealed: about 8% the size of Facebook's dailies
- Twitter, for the first time, revealed the number of its monetizable daily active users: 126 million.
- This number is much smaller than the combined properties of Facebook and that of Snapchat.
- It’s likely that Twitter is revealing this new metric now to give investors a better idea of the company’s growth.
For the first time, we now have an idea of the number of monetizable Twitter daily users; that is, the number of people who log in to Twitter each day and potentially view an advertisement. That number is 126 million.
It’s not completely clear why Twitter chose now to reveal this number, as usually it only announces its monthly active users, which for the previous quarter was 321 million. It’s possible the company decided to do so because the daily active user number went up year over year while the number of monthly users went down.
For the sake of comparison, the number of daily active users on Twitter at the same time last year was 115 million, which would mean daily use went up by nearly nine percent. Monthly user numbers this time last year were at 330 million, which means that number declined by about three percent year over year.
According to Twitter, it finally revealed its daily user number to “help ad buyers better understand the potential reach for their advertising.”
However, the reveal is also giving investors and the general public a concrete idea of just how much smaller user engagement is with Twitter when compared to rival social networks. Facebook’s properties — including Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp — totaled 1.52 billion daily active users in the previous quarter. Instagram alone had 500 million daily active users in 2017 (the most recent data we could find) and is most likely getting even more than that today.
Snapchat reports 186 million daily active users, about 32 percent more than Twitter.
However, Twitter points out that comparisons to other apps can sometimes be misleading. For example, Snapchat obtains its daily active data by monitoring when users open the app, not if they do something that could possibly show them an ad. If a Snapchat user taps a message notification, reads that message in the app, and then closes out, they are now a daily active user, but they at no point had the chance to see an advertisement, which is what advertisers really want to know from the data.
Twitter shares dropped 10 percent after the reveal of its quarterly report, via Reuters.
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