Twitter on Thursday announced ambitious goals to double both its user base and revenue in the next two years, the landmarks of its chief financial officer said it believes the company is more than capable of meeting.
The social media company said it wants to grow its daily active users to 315 million, up from 152 million at the end of 2019, and reach $ 7.5 billion on the top line, up from $ 3.7 billion. dollars in 2020, by the end of 2023.
Twitter shares rose to new highs after the announcement, rising by more than 3%, despite the broader technology sector suffering the worst trading day in October.
After closing, 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 ourselves such big goals because we have a lot of confidence in our strategy,” he said in a “Crazy Money” interview. “We’re running much faster and we have a clear path ahead of us, with tons of people still not using Twitter and over $ 150 billion in addressable market for digital ads that can come on Twitter.”
The targets are aggressive coming out of the coronavirus pandemic. To meet them, Segal said Twitter will focus on accelerating the launch of new products and features, helping to attract new users and even developing a new subscription model. The company recently announced the acquisition of the Revue newsletter platform to allow creators to publish and generate money from editorial newsletters.
Twitter, valued as a $ 59.5 billion company, held an analyst earlier on Thursday to reveal its new perspectives and products. Management has also teased new functions, some of which already exist elsewhere in the social media world, which are planned to be launched in the future.
The tested features include Super Follow subscriptions, where followers can pay for access to exclusive content; Micro-communities, in which groups can be formed around a topic, and a new security mode that allows the automatic blocking and deactivation of abusive or incomplete accounts.
Following the growing success of the Clubhouse audio chat application, Twitter has also launched its own feature called Spaces.
“This for us feels like a natural extension of where we started with texts. We’ve added images, we’ve added videos, live videos, audio tweets, and now you can log in … and create a space and have a conversation. Other people can join and others can listen, “Segal said.” People can post on Twitter with him. This will be an extraordinary experience. “
While closing and restrictions on the coronavirus business have been particularly heavy for brick-and-mortar companies, the Twitter service, which is a difficult advertising business, has also seen a slowdown in sales.
Twitter recorded a single-digit average growth in 2020, which followed years of double-digit sales growth. The company reported 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 reported a loss. of $ 1.14 billion, its first annual loss in 2017.
As for the current quarter, Twitter expects to increase revenue by double digits compared to the quarter a year ago. The company provided revenue guidance of between $ 940 million and $ 1 billion.