Twitter usage in India grew 74% YoY in Oct-Dec 2020

Chennai: India was among the fastest growing markets for Twitter in the October-December quarter of 2020 as monetizable Daily Active Usage (mDAU) of the social media platform grew 74% year-on-year in the country during the period.

“In order to achieve our ambitions, we need to grow Twitter in developing markets where there are millions of potential customers, but where we have very nascent adoption today. Regions like India and Africa are great examples, where we see promising growth rates,” Twitter product lead Kayvon Beykpour said, speaking at an analyst event.

Twitter recorded 84% YoY growth in mDAUs in Nigeria. Earlier this month at the company’s earnings call, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey said that over 80% of the platform’s audience is outside the US.

At 192 million, Twitter’s total mDAUs grew by five million in the December quarter. The user base was up 26.3% compared to a year ago. Dorsey noted that accelerating product development, reaching at least 315 million mDAU in the fourth quarter of 2023, and more than doubling the company’s total annual revenue to over $7.5 billion in 2023, were its key three priorities. Given its recent engagements with governments in India and the US on requests for banning accounts and taking down posts, Dorsey addressed a growing trust deficit against the company from a section of users. “We agree many people don’t trust us. Never has this been more pronounced than the last few years,” he said.

This isn’t just about our actions to promote healthy conversation, it goes broader and deeper, down to how we use technology like machine learning algorithms.”

Noting that every institution worldwide is experiencing a significant trust deficit, he said Twitter is working to earn the trust. “We intend to make our content moderation practices more transparent, give people more controls to moderate their interactions, enable a marketplace approach to relevance algorithms, and fund an open source social media standard we call @bluesky,” he said.

Twitter is funding a small independent team of open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for the public conversation on the Internet called Project Blue Sky. Reaching a target mDAU would involve Twitter compounding growth at about 20% per year from the base of 152 million mDAU it reported in the fourth quarter of 2019, and the company is actively targeting emerging markets where it has a small base to achieve this goal.

In 2021, Twitter plans to grow its headcount by greater than 20% and expenses by 25% or more. The expansion in team will be disproportionately focused on engineering, Twitter said, noting that increasing the engineering scale will help them achieve their growth targets.