Twitter reports increased first-quarter revenue, reveals data error

Twitter reported an increase in first-quarter revenue on Thursday, three days after accepting Elon Musk’s bid to take the company private.

The US social media company made what could be its last public earnings announcement, which showed first-quarter revenue up 16% to $1.2 billion. Net income for the quarter was $513 million, boosted by the sale of its MoPub mobile ad platform. 

As the Twitter board accepted Tesla CEO Musk’s bid to take the company private on Monday, the standard post-earnings conference call with analysts was canceled. 

"In light of the proposed transaction with Mr. Musk, as is customary during the pendency of an acquisition, Twitter will not be hosting a conference call, issuing a shareholder letter, or providing financial guidance in conjunction with its first quarter 2022 earnings release," the report read.

Twitter's earnings report showed that daily active users rose 16% to 229 million during the first quarter, but the social media platform revealed it miscalculated active user figures between 2019 and 2021. The mistake overstated user numbers by between 1% and 2% over the period.

"In March of 2019, we launched a feature that allowed people to link multiple separate accounts together in order to conveniently switch between accounts. An error was made at that time, such that actions taken via the primary account resulted in all linked accounts being counted as mDAU. This resulted in an overstatement of mDAU from Q1’19 through Q4’21," the report noted.

Since the $44 billion bid was accepted there has been debate over what impact Musk will have on Twitter. While he has openly talked about championing free speech on the platform he’s also addressed issues with spam bots – which might have a positive impact on Crypto Twitter.

Speaking at a recent TED talk, Musk addressed his concern with bots, noting that the spam bots negatively impact the user experience on Twitter. “They make the product much worse. If I had a dogecoin for every crypto scam I saw, I would have a hundred billion dogecoin."

Musk has been the target of several impersonation attempts in the past and recently scammers have used popular NFT projects to scam users, even targeting Bernie Sanders' son’s verified account.

Blockchain technology has been muted as one solution to these issues and recently Twitter became the first company to test out payment platform Stripe's new payment system, Stripe Connect.

Stripe will support payments through the USDC stablecoin on the Polygon blockchain, according to an announcement made last week, these payments will be accessible through Stripe Connect.

This will enable verified content creators on the platform to receive earnings through USDC and Stripe has plans to introduce additional currencies in the future. Musk pushed the use of cryptocurrency at Tesla, allowing customers to use dogecoin for purchases, and the likelihood of Twitter exploring integrations with cryptocurrency and blockchain technology further is one possibility once his takeover bid is complete.