Twitter announced ambitious goals on Thursday to double both its user base and revenue over the next two years. Milestones the chief financial officer said he thinks the company is more than capable of meeting those goals.
The social media company intends to grow its daily active users from 152 million in late 2019 to 315 million and to generate revenue of $ 7.5 billion by the end of 2023, up from $ 3.7 billion in 2020 .
Twitter stock hit new highs following the announcement, rising more than 3% despite the broader tech sector having its worst trading day since October.
Upon closing, Twitter’s CFO Ned Segal told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that the forecast reflected 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 worked a lot faster and have a clear path ahead of us with tons of people still not using Twitter and an addressable market of over $ 150 billion for digital ads that may come on Twitter.”
The targets are aggressive coronavirus pandemic outbreaks. To meet them, Segal says Twitter will focus on accelerating the release of new products and features, attracting new users, and even developing a new subscription model. The company recently announced the acquisition of the Revue newsletter platform, which allows developers to publish and monetize editorial newsletters.
$ 59.5 billion worth of Twitter hosted an Analyst Day Thursday to showcase its new prospects and products. Management has also tested new features, some of which already exist elsewhere in the social media world and which are set to roll out in the future.
Features we tested included Super Follow Subscriptions, which allow followers to pay to access exclusive content. Micro-communities where groups can be formed on a topic and a new security mode that allows accounts that are abusive or sketchy to be automatically blocked and muted.
With the growing success of the Clubhouse audio chat room app, Twitter also released its own feature called Spaces.
“For us this is a natural extension of where we started with text. We added pictures, we added video, live video, audio tweets, and now you can go in … and create a space and a conversation Lead. Other people can participate and others can listen, “said Segal. “People can tweet next to it. It’s going to be a great experience.”
While closing and restricting the coronavirus business was particularly difficult for brick and mortar businesses, revenue on Twitter, an ad-supported business, also slowed.
Twitter saw mid-single-digit growth in 2020, following double-digit revenue growth for two consecutive years. The company had revenue of $ 3.7 billion that year, up 7.4% from $ 3.46 billion in 2019. As costs and expenses rose last year, Twitter also posted one Loss of $ 1.14 billion, the first annual loss since 2017.
For the current quarter, Twitter expects double-digit sales growth compared to the same quarter of the previous year. The company announced a revenue forecast of between $ 940 billion and $ 1 billion.
