Twitter announced ambitious goals on Thursday to double both its user base and revenue over the next two years, milestones that the CFO said he believes the company is more than capable of meeting.
The social media company said it aims to grow its daily active users to 315 million, up from 152 million at the end of 2019, and $ 7.5 billion on the top line, up from $ 3.7 billion in 2020, by the end of 2023.
Twitter shares rallied to new highs following the announcement, gaining more than 3% despite the broader technology sector experiencing its worst trading day since October.
Following the close, Twitter CFO Ned Segal told CNBC’s Jim Cramer that the forecast reflects 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 are executing 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 digital ad market that can come to Twitter.”
The targets are aggressive and stem from the coronavirus pandemic. To meet them, Segal said Twitter will focus on accelerating the release of new products and features, helping attract new users, and even developing a new subscription model. The company recently announced the acquisition of the newsletter platform Revue, allowing creators to publish and monetize editorial newsletters.
Twitter, valued as a $ 59.5 billion company, held an analyst day earlier Thursday to reveal its new outlook and products. Management also teased new features, some of which already exist elsewhere in the social media world, which will be rolled out in the future.
Features being tested include Super Follow subscriptions, where followers can pay to access exclusive content; Microcommunities, where groups can be formed around a topic, and a new security mode to automatically block and mute offensive or nebulous accounts.
In the wake of the growing success of the Clubhouse audio chat room app, Twitter has also released its own feature called Spaces.
“This feels like a natural extension to us from where we started with texting. We’ve added images, we’ve added video, live video, audio tweets and now you can go in … and create a space and have a conversation. Other people can join in and others can listen, “Segal said.” People can tweet next door. This will be a great experience. “
While the coronavirus business closures and restrictions have been especially tough for brick-and-mortar businesses, Twitter’s service, which is an ad-heavy business, also saw sales slow.
Twitter posted mid-single-digit growth in 2020, following years of double-digit growth. The company reported $ 3.7 billion in revenue that year, an increase of 7.4% from $ 3.46 billion in 2019. As costs and expenses increased last year, Twitter also reported a loss of $ 1.14. billion, the first annual loss since 2017.
For the current quarter, Twitter expects double-digit revenue growth over the same quarter a year ago. The company offered sales guidance between $ 940 million and $ 1 billion.