Twitter has announced its second-quarter earnings for 2020. Unlike prior earnings reports, one thing that loomed large over this one’s was the unprecedented hack of high-profile accounts earlier this month. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey did address the incident in a statement released with the earnings. But first, the numbers:
- Twitter Q2 2020 diluted earnings per share: -$1.56
- Twitter Q2 2020 revenue: $683 million
- Twitter Q2 2020 monetizable daily active users (mDAUs): 186 million
The all-important monetizable daily active users (mDAU) metric was up from 166 million at the end of Q1 2020 to 186 million this quarter—a rise of 20 million. That’s also a big upswing from the 139 million YOY mDAUs—a 39% increase. Revenue, however, came in at only $683 million, down 19% YOY. Advertising revenue suffered the worst of all Twitter’s revenue streams. Ad revenue accounted for $562 million, down 23% YOY.
In a statement, Twitter addressed the disappointing ad revenue, saying, “widespread economic disruption and a significant decrease in global advertising spend as a result of the pandemic led to a 27% decline in advertising revenue in the last three weeks of March. We saw a gradual, moderate recovery relative to March levels throughout most of Q2, with the exception of late May to mid-June, when many brands slowed or paused spend in reaction to U.S. civil unrest.”
Announcing Twitter’s Q2 earnings, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said:
Our product work is paying off, with tremendous growth in audience and engagement. We grew mDAU to 186 million, a 34% year over year increase in Q2, the highest quarterly year-over-year growth rate we’ve delivered since we began reporting mDAU growth. I also want to address the security issue Twitter suffered last week. We moved quickly to address what happened, and have taken additional steps to improve resiliency against targeted social engineering attempts, implemented numerous safeguards to improve the security of our internal systems, and are working with law enforcement. We understand our responsibilities and are committed to earning the trust of all of our stakeholders with our every action, including how we address this security issue. We will continue to be transparent in sharing our learnings and remediations.
Twitter’s stock is currently up over 6% in pre-market trading at the time of this writing.
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