Twitter on Thursday announced ambitious targets to double its user base and revenue over the next two years. The milestones his chief financial officer said are that the company is more than capable of meeting.
The social media company said it wants to increase its daily active users to 315 million, compared to 152 million at the end of 2019, and will reach $ 7.5 billion on the top line, at $ 3.7 billion by 2020. the end of 2023.
Twitter shares rose to new highs after the announcement, rising more than 3%, despite the broader technology sector suffering the worst trading day since October.
After the close, Twitter chief financial officer Ned Segal told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that the forecast reflects the company’s optimism about its future performance.
“We can set such big goals because we have a lot of confidence in our strategy,” he said in a “Mad Money” interview. “We’ve executed much faster and we have a clear path ahead of us with tons of people still not using Twitter and more than $ 150 billion worth of digital advertising marketable coming to Twitter.”
The targets are aggressive arising from the coronavirus pandemic. To meet them, Segal said Twitter will focus on speeding up the release of new products and features, gathering new users and even developing a new subscriber model. The company recently announced the acquisition of the newsletter platform Revue to enable creators to publish editorial newsletters and thereby earn money.
Twitter, valued as a $ 59.5 billion company, held an analyst day earlier Thursday to announce its new outlook and products. Management has also teased new features, some of which exist elsewhere in the social media world, and which are planned to be developed in the future.
Features tested include Super Follow subscriptions, where followers can pay for access to exclusive content; Micro-communities, where groups can be formed around a topic, and a new security mode to automatically block and mute accounts that are offensive or sketchy.
Following the growing success of the audio app Clubhouse, Twitter has also introduced its own feature called Spaces.
“It feels to us like a natural extension of where we started with texts. We’ve added images, we’ve added video, live video, audio tweets and now you can go inside … and create a space and a “People can join you and others can listen,” Segal said. “People can tweet next door. It’s going to be a great experience. “
While the closures and restrictions on coronavirus have been particularly difficult for brick-and-mortar businesses, sales of Twitter’s service, which is an advertising-heavy business, have also slowed.
Twitter showed a mid-single-digit growth in 2020, following years of double-digit sales growth. The company reported $ 3.7 billion in revenue that year, up 7.4% from $ 3.46 billion in 2019. As costs and expenses rose last year, Twitter also reported a $ 1.14 billion loss , its first annual loss since 2017.
As for the current quarter, Twitter expects revenue to double-digit revenue from the previous quarter. The company generated a revenue list of between $ 940 million and $ 1 billion.