How Twitter Makes Money: Advertising and Data Licensing

Twitter (TWTR), the social media company founded in 2006, is now ubiquitous via its posts—called tweets—on the Internet and all forms of media. It’s best known for news-breaking tweets from politicians and celebrities, but it provides a platform for millions of users to publish their thoughts, interact, share content, and read breaking news. The platform itself is free to use for individuals and businesses alike. Once a user has created an account, they can post messages (“tweets”) of up to 280 characters and up to 2,400 times per day, which are automatically distributed to followers in a feed that is constantly refreshed.

Twitter divides its revenue into two categories: the sale of advertising services, which constitutes the vast majority of the company’s revenue, and data licensing and other services. Twitter’s major competitors include other social media companies like Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. (FB), Google and YouTube parent Alphabet Inc. (GOOG), Snap Inc. (SNAP), and others.

Twitter’s Financials

Twitter announced in February financial results for its 2021 fiscal year (FY), which ended Dec. 31, 2021. The company’s net loss narrowed significantly to $221.4 million from $1.1 billion in the previous year. Annual revenue rose 36.6% year over year (YOY) to $5.1 billion. Twitter’s costs and expenses rose at a faster rate than revenue and included a one-time, litigation-related charge of $765.7 million.

Twitter generates the majority of its revenue through selling ad space on its platform to global advertisers. To attract advertisers it needs a large and growing user base. Twitter measures its user base using a metric it calls monetizable daily active users (mDAU), which is broadly defined as the total number of user accounts that were logged in and accessed Twitter on any given day. Twitter’s average mDAU in the fourth quarter of FY 2021 rose approximately 13% YOY to 217 million.

Twitter’s Business Segments

Twitter has a single operating segment and reporting structure. However, in its financial reporting, the company does separate its revenue into two categories: advertising services; and data licensing and other.

Advertising Services

Advertising services generated $4.5 billion, or about 89%, of Twitter’s revenue in FY 2021. The segment’s revenue rose 40.5% compared to FY 2020. Twitter generates most of its advertising revenue by selling promoted products, including Promoted Ads and Twitter Amplify, Follower Ads, and Twitter Takeover, to advertisers.

The company creates tailored advertising opportunities by using an algorithm to make sure promoted products make it into the right users’ timelines, search results, profile pages, and Tweet conversations. Advertisers have the ability to target an audience based on multiple criteria. Twitter provides ways for advertisers to build and grow an audience interested in the products or services they are offering. Advertisers also have the option to pay for ads that will appear at the top of the trending-topics list or timeline.

While the majority of revenue from advertising services is generated through Twitter’s owned and operated platform, a small portion of the advertising products Twitter sells are also placed on third-party publishers’ websites, applications, and other offerings.

Data Licensing and Others

Over 11% of Twitter’s revenue in FY 2021, or $571.8 million, was from data licensing and other sources. Revenue for the segment grew 12.3% compared to the previous year. Twitter also sells data licenses that enable its data partners to access and analyze historical and real-time data on the company’s platform. The “other sources” include service fees Twitter collects from users of its mobile ad exchange, MoPub. However, Twitter completed the sale of its MoPub business on Jan. 1, 2022.

Twitter’s Recent Developments

On Jan. 1, 2022, Twitter completed its sale of MoPub, as mentioned above. The company sold the mobile ad exchange platform to AppLovin Corp. for less than $1.1 billion in cash. Twitter said that it would terminate the MoPub platform, including its network mediation, Advanced Bidding, and Marketplace services on March 31, 2022. The MoPub Dashboard and Reporting will still be available, however, until Apr. 8, 2022.

How Twitter Reports Diversity and Inclusiveness

As part of our effort to improve the awareness of the importance of diversity in companies, we offer investors a glimpse into the transparency of Twitter and its commitment to diversity, inclusiveness, and social responsibility. We examined the data Twitter releases to show you how it reports the diversity of its board and workforce to help readers make educated purchasing and investing decisions.

Below is a table of potential diversity measurements. It shows whether Twitter discloses its data about the diversity of its board of directors, C-Suite, general management, and employees overall, as is marked with a ✔. It also shows whether Twitter breaks down those reports to reveal the diversity of itself by race, gender, ability, veteran status, and LGBTQ+ identity.