That was convenient: Back then Meta’s Facebook app seemed to have around 10 times the number of daily users as Twitter did.ĭoesn’t. The new metric is “not comparable to current disclosures from other companies,” Twitter said in its fourth-quarter 2018 shareholder letter, noting its goal wasn’t to disclose the largest daily active user number it could.
But in early 2019, Twitter introduced a novel metric, “monetizable daily active users,” which it defined as those users who could view ads. Was telling investors that daily active user growth was “the best measure” of its success in driving the use of the platform as a daily utility. Even though its hottest asset these days is Instagram, those specific user numbers remain anyone’s best guess. It tells you how many people use its Facebook app and its broader “family” of apps on a daily and monthly basis, respectively.
Simultaneously shares so much and yet so little. All social-media companies seem to have their own standard for how they measure their breadth. Ad revenue is money and, we have to hope, not something that can be so easily fudged or forgivably miscounted.
