Twitter has been overstating its number of active users for nearly three years.
The company admitted this in its quarterly earnings report for the first quarter of 2022.
“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 says.
The difference in users counted ranges from 1.4 million to 1.9 million daily users, with the largest difference found in the last quarter of 2021, the company announced.
The error doesn’t dramatically impact Twitter’s results, given that the company currently has 229 million active users (with hope that the number is accurate this time). It is, however, telling that Twitter has already made a similar mistake once before, having counted its monthly active users inaccurately back in 2017.
Other than this tiny error, Twitter’s earnings report isn’t bad, with the company reporting Q1 revenue of $1.2 billion, a 16 percent year-over-year increase, and a massive net income increase from $68 million in Q1 2021 to $513 million this quarter (largely thanks to the company’s sale of mobile advertising network MoPub for $1.05 billion).
Twitter also said that, given the company’s agreement to be acquired by Elon Musk, it would not be providing any forward looking guidance, and is withdrawing all previously provided goals and outlook.
