Twitter’s new CEO clings to growth targets despite attracting just 6M new users

Twitter has just delivered its first major business update with new CEO Parag Agrawal at the helm. Its average monetizable daily active users (mDAU) rose to 217 million, a modest increase of 13 percent year over year, but below the 218.6 million some analysts expected, CNBC reports. Overall revenue from 2021 was $5.08 billion, an increase of 37 percent year on year.

Although the lines are all pointing in the right direction, Twitter has been hoping to grow far more rapidly than this. By the end of 2023, Twitter has said it hopes to hit 315 million average monetizable daily active users. If it continues to add users at this rate each quarter, it will fall well short of this goal.

However, despite the challenges facing Agrawal, the company is sticking with its previous goal. “There are no changes to our goals of 315 million average mDAU in Q4 2023,” the company’s CFO Ned Segal said in a statement.

The update comes as Agrawal has pledged to speed up development at the company. After his appointment was announced in late November, Twitter said it was acquiring the messaging platform Quill to improve its direct messaging features, and recent platform feature additions included support for NFT profile pictures in January and automatic video captions in December.

But even before former CEO Jack Dorsey’s departure, the pace of new product launches at Twitter had accelerated rapidly. The company has been hard at work on its social audio feature called Spaces, has rolled out a paid service called Twitter Blue, and has also added other platform monetization features for creators like the Super Follows feature and Tip Jars in a bid to bolster its user base.

Agrawal has reorganized Twitter into three key pillars since taking charge: Consumer, Revenue, and Core Tech. Several high-ranking employees have since departed the company, including former engineering lead Michal Montano, head of design and research Dantley Davis, head of security Peiter Zatko, and chief information security officer Rinki Sethi, the New York Times reported last month.