According to multiple reports (via Bloomberg), Twitter‘s daily user growth reached “all-time highs” during Elon Musk‘s first full week as the platform’s owner.
According to an internal FAQ shared with Twitter’s sales team on Monday to use in conversations with advertisers, monetizable daily user (mDAU) growth has accelerated to more than 20% since Musk’s dramatic takeover, while “Twitter’s largest market, the US, is growing even more quickly.”
According to the FAQ, Twitter has added more than 15 million mDAUs since the end of the second quarter, when it stopped reporting financials as a public company.
If those statistics are consistent with how Twitter reported metrics when it was publicly available, they indicate that the service has not seen a mass exodus under Musk’s ownership.
Musk tweeted on Sunday that “Twitter user numbers have increased significantly around the world” since his deal to buy Twitter was announced. Twitter reported 237.8 million mDAUs and a 16.6 percent year-over-year growth rate in the second quarter.
Musk said in another tweet on Friday that the company has seen a “massive drop in revenue” as a result of “activist groups pressuring advertisers.” Reports of a sharp increase in racist and hateful tweets following his takeover initially shocked advertisers, but Twitter later explained that the influx was the result of coordinated “trolling campaigns.”
According to the FAQ for advertisers published on Monday, “levels of hate speech remain within historical norms, representing 0.25% to 0.45% of tweets per day among hundreds of millions.”
In the meantime, Musk’s breakdown of Twitter’s leadership, combined with the resignation of the company’s top advertising executive, Sarah Personette, has left advertisers unsure who to approach with their concerns. Alex Josephson, a 10-year company vet who is currently VP of Twitter Next, a team that has helped brands create campaigns on the social network since 2019, shared the FAQ on Monday.
His post to the sales team notes that Musk’s mass layoffs on Friday affected 25% of the organization and that “the decision to scale back our presence in select geographies contributed significantly to the sales reductions.”
Another source of concern for advertisers has been Musk’s own tweeting, particularly a now-deleted tweet that amplified a bogus conspiracy theory about the violent attack on Paul Pelosi. “Do the same rules apply to Elon as to everyone else on Twitter?” reads one part of the Twitter advertiser FAQ. The answer is simply, “Yes.”
It also reiterates Musk’s claim that Twitter will not change its content moderation policies until a “content moderation council of widely diverse viewpoints” is formed and convened. It’s unclear whether Musk is aware that Twitter already has a Trust and Safety Council comprised of outside experts.
Another section of the FAQ highlights how quickly things are changing on Twitter right now, stating that the upcoming redesign of the Twitter Blue subscription, which will include paid verification, “will not affect existing verified accounts at this time” and that “large brand advertisers who are already verified will now have an additional ‘Official’ label beneath their name upon Twitter Blue’s relaunch this week.”
If Musk first tasked employees with revamping Blue and the verification process, he wanted them to charge $20 per month and require existing verified accounts to pay or lose their checkmarks after 90 days. After author Stephen King and others objected to the price, Musk quickly reduced it to $8 per month.
And, despite his initial statement that the team working on it needed to release the new Blue subscription by November 7th or risk being fired, its release has now been postponed until after this week’s midterm elections.
