Twitter Stock Hits High On New Revenue, User Goals

Jill Goldsmith
·3 min read

UPDATED with details from presentation: Twitter unveiled a new feature it’s working on called Super Follows that will let users charge followers. It’s a way to help creators and publishers monetize their participation on the platform, and to help Twitter develop a dual revenue stream with a kind of subscription model. At its Investor Day Thursday, the company showed a mockup of a user charging $4.99 month to receive certain exclusive perks. It’s not clear when feature will debut.

Twitter is also mulling “tipping,” where users can donate money to others they like following.

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A communities feature will let users create and join specific groups. It’s part of Twitter’s ongoing effort to personalize the service. The “Interest” function, for instance, has driven engagement, executives said. It identifies and pulls out tweets of interest to users even if they haven’t plugged in a specific account to follow.

Twitter execs talked a lot about safety and a Safety Mode feature that lets users block or hide or replies from other accounts that troll them. “We don’t believe Twitter alone can and should be a police officer for all conversations,” said CEO Jack Dorsey. “It’s important for people to exercise more control around who can interact with them,” he said, because while interactions may be unpleasant, they don’t always violate the platform’s term of service. He said people using this function are seeing an 85% reduction in “toxic and abusive replies.”

PREVIOUSLY: Twitter plans to at least double annual revenue and hit 315 million or more daily active users in 2023, the social media giant said Thursday ahead of an investor day set for noon ET.

The daily active users (DAU) figure reps a 20% compound annual growth rate from the 152 million reported in the fourth quarter of 2019. The goal is to see sales jump to $7.5 billion from $3.7 billion in 2002 by growing audience and gaining advertising market share in both brand and direct response.

The new targets buoyed Twitter shares which jumped as much as 12% to a record intraday high of $80.75. They’re trading up 9% late morning, outpacing the broader market and the rest of the tech sector. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is down 1.2%. DJIA is down by about 160 points.

CEO Jack Dorsey will kick off the event, which will focus on “Healthy Participation” in consumer product priorities, policy and enforcement as well as financial metrics and faster development.

Content moderation has become a major issue with Twitter at the fore, having permanently banned former president Donald Trump from the platform for his comments during and after the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Dorsey has reassured investors several times over the past month that Twitter is bigger than any one account and average daily users and revenue are expected to rise in the current first quarter.

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