- Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter withdrew its quarterly forecast. Twitter originally issued guidance in early February at revenues of $825 million to $885 million for the first quarter.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Twitter withdrew its quarterly forecast according to The Motley Fool. Twitter originally issued guidance in early February at revenues of $825 million to $885 million for the first quarter — which would have been growth of about 9% at the midpoint. Now Twitter is expecting revenue in the first quarter to decline slightly year-over-year.
The company’s operating income was also forecasted at breakeven to $30 million. However, Twitter is now expecting to see an operating loss.
Like Facebook, Twitter has been seeing a major increase in engagement while people stay at home and tap into the social media platform for news about public health and for passing the time.
Twitter’s monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) have jumped to 164 million quarter to date, which is up from 152 million in the fourth quarter. But Twitter has not been able to effectively monetize the usage since advertisers are reducing their spending.
“Twitter’s purpose is to serve the public conversation, and in these trying times our work has never been more critical,” said Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. “We’re seeing a meaningful increase in people using Twitter, and our teams are demonstrating incredible resilience adapting to this unprecedented environment.”
And Twitter CFO Ned Segal pointed out that the COVID-19 crisis “impacted Twitter’s advertising revenue globally more significantly in the last few weeks.” Twitter also pulled back on its stock-based compensation, head count growth, and capital expenditures.
In order to prevent the spread of misinformation about COVID-19, Twitter also expanded on the content that would be banned. Now the safety rules includes the removal of content that would place people at higher risk of spreading COVID-19.
Update: we’re expanding our safety rules to include content that could place people at a higher risk of transmitting COVID-19.
Now, we will require people to remove Tweets that include the following:
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) March 18, 2020
