Twitter Misses Targets for Revenue, Profits, User Growth Under Censor-Happy CEO

Twitter posted its first earnings report since appointing its new censorship-happy CEO, Parag Agrawal, and missed analyst estimates on earnings, revenue, and user growth.

CNBC reports that Twitter reported its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2021 this week, missing analyst estimates on earnings, revenue, and user growth. The report was the first of its kind since Twitter found Jack Dorsey was replaced as CEO by Parag Agrawal, who has said that the company is not “bound by the First Amendment. Agrawal continued: “The kinds of things that we do about this is, focus less on thinking about free speech, but thinking about how the times have changed.” Unfortunately for the company, Agrawal’s censor-happy approach seems to have been bad for business.

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal

CNBC summarized the key figures from the report:

Earnings per share: 33 cents, adjusted vs 35 cents expected, according to a Refinitiv survey of analysts
Revenue: $1.57 billion vs $1.58 billion expected, according to Refinitv
Monetizable Daily Active Users (mDAUs): 217 million vs 218.6 million expected, according to StreetAccount

Twitter set revenue guidance for the next quarter ranging from $1.17 billion to $1.27. Refinitv stated that analysis had projected revenue of around $1.26 billion. The company further announced a $4 billion share buyback program, half of which will be an accelerated share repurchase with the rest being purchased over time.

Jack Dorsey at Bitcoin conference ( Joe Raedle /Getty)

Twitter CFO Ned Segal commented that the company’s previously stated goals of reaching 315 million mDAUs in Q4 2023 and $7.5 billion in revenue in 2023 have not changed, despite the company’s poor performance in the most recent quarter.

Segal blamed the company’s poor Q4 revenue on a slowdown in advertised spending in the last few weeks of Q4, but he expected to see an uptick in spending moving into Q1. The social media giant said that it has been relatively unaffected by Apple’s recent iOS privacy-related updates, which Facebook claims will cost the company around $10 billion in revenue due to advertising tracking changes.

The company said last quarter: “Although retooling our revenue products in light of Apple’s privacy-related iOS changes took additional time, energy, and resources in 2020 and 2021, we believe that our product improvements have helped reduce the impact on Twitter.”

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