Twitter says will stop reporting monthly active users

Twitter on Thursday said it would stop reporting monthly active users (MAUs) after Q1 2019 as it would switch to a new metric called monetizable daily active users (mDAUs) to reflect its audience moving forward. "Monetizable DAU are Twitter users who log in and access Twitter on any given day through twitter.com or our Twitter applications that are able to show ads," the company said in a statement.

Average monetizable DAU (mDAU) were 126 million in Q4, up 9 per cent year-over-year, with double-digit growth in five out of our top 10 global markets. The monthly active users, however, fell to 321 million in the fourth quarter from 326 million in the third quarter.

Announcing its fourth quarter results, Twitter posted $909 million in revenue and net income of $255 million in Q4. Shares fell nearly 7 per cent after the results were announced. Japan was its second largest market after the US, growing 30 per cent and contributing $138 million in Q4.

The total revenue for 2018 exceeded $3 billion. "Video ad formats continued to be our fastest-growing ad format in Q4, driven by strength in Video Website Card, in-stream pre-roll, and First View ads. Video was more than half of ad

revenue for Q4 and for 2018," Twitter said in a statement. Twitter said its mDAU are not comparable to current disclosures from other companies, many of whom share a more expansive metric that includes people who are not seeing ads.

"We want to align our external stakeholders around one metric that reflects our goal of delivering value to people on Twitter every day and monetizing that usage. "So, starting this quarter, in addition to sharing the growth in mDAU as we have since 2016, we are disclosing the absolute number of average mDAU (previously referred to as DAU), for both the US and international markets," said Twitter.

As mDAU will be the metric we use to show the size of our audience and engagement going forward, we will discontinue disclosing MAU after Q1 2019, it added.