Twitter Revenue Rises in 2Q2021 Spurred by Ad Enhancements

Twitter's efforts to help brands reach potential customers on its platform through improved ads paid off in 2Q2021, delivering a 74 percent increase in revenue compared to the same period last year. The social networking company announced revenue of US$1.19 billion versus the US$1.07 billion expected by analysts. 

The Jack Dorsey-led company added seven million new users in 2Q2021, meaning an 11 percent increase in monetizable daily active users and bringing the company's total audience to 206 million daily users. When the pandemic started, Twitter saw one of its most difficult periods as advertisers began to reduce and withdraw budgets from the platform, Bloomberg reported. In the period April to June last year alone, advertising revenue and sales fell by 19 percent. This prompted the platform to look for ways to diversify its revenues and started to push call-to-action advertising. According to its 1Q2021 earnings report, advertising makes up more than 86 percent of Twitter’s revenue.

Although Apple's new privacy updates associated with tracking for iOS 14 users raised concerns about the potential threat to Twitter's performance, the company said in its letter to shareholders that the impact was less than expected.

During 2Q2021, the tech company also introduced new features that boosted its performance like its first subscription service Twitter Blue, which gives users willing to pay monthly fee access to exclusive features such as the Undo Tweet button, which allows customers to see what their tweet would look like before it is published and fix it if necessary. There is no date yet for this feature to be released in Mexico. Although users have been asking for it for a long time, this is not an edit button, the company noted. “We started as an SMS, text message service. And as you all know, when you send a text, you cannot really take it back,” Jack Dorsey said in a video for Wired back in Jan. 2020. “We wanted to preserve that vibe, that feeling, in the early days.” 

Meanwhile, Twitter said last week it will shut down its short-lived posting feature Fleets on August 3, just eight months after its global launch, after the product failed to gain the traction the platform had hoped for. “We hoped Fleets would help more people feel comfortable joining the conversation on Twitter,” the company said in a blog post. “But, in the time since we introduced Fleets to everyone, we have not seen an increase in the number of new people joining the conversation with Fleets as we hoped.”