Twitter surprised investors and followers Thursday with revenue gains and its first profit, but some analysts say the company is still withholding vital information.
Twitter (TWTR), on its earnings conference call, declined to give hard daily active user (DAU) statistics, simply saying it achieved its fifth consecutive quarter of double digit DAU growth, with a 12% year-over-year increase. That’s all well and good, say analysts, but without actual numbers, it’s a relatively meaningless boast.
“The DAU growth metric is literally the FIRST THING in their shareholder letter,” said Wedbush Securities’ Michael Pachter via Twitter. “Their excuse that they won’t disclose is lame. If they can’t tell us the numbers, why brag about growth? It’s either important (and should be disclosed) or not (and should be ignored).”
Pachter’s frustration grew as the call went on.
Twitter's CFO literally just stated that DAU growth is the most important metric, five minutes after saying they won't disclose DAUs. I suppose if they tell us, they have to kill us...
— Michael Pachter (@michaelpachter) February 8, 2018
And he wasn’t the only critic.
Why doesn’t twitter disclose DAU? This seem like a very important metric to hide. MAU for $twtr seems irrelevant. We say if they don’t tell you a number it’s because it’s not good. My guess 60 mil DAU at twitter. $twtr
— Ross Gerber (@GerberKawasaki) February 8, 2018
Relying on percentage growth figures without giving any sort of base is an old trick of corporations. The reigning king of this strategy is Amazon, which has yet to give hard numbers regarding Amazon Prime members, though it has regularly touted the service’s membership growth.
While Twitter won’t disclose the number of daily users, it did, however, shed some light on monthly active users. That number was roughly the same as the prior quarter at 330 million, a lower-than-projected total that the company attributed in part to stepped-up efforts to reduce spam, malicious activity, and fake accounts.