Twitter’s Revenue by Segment (2012 – 2022)

This statistic highlights Twitter’s Revenue by Segment from 2012 onwards, split between Advertising services, and Data licensing & others.  

Twitter’s Revenue by Segment

(All figures in millions, except percentages)

Twitter witnessed a 28% year-over-year growth with revenue amounting to $1,036.02 million in Q1 2021 from $807.64 million in Q1 2020. Twitter’s total revenue is split between two categories: Advertising Services; and Data Licensing and Other.

Advertising Services

Twitter generated around 87% of total revenue from advertising services which include selling promoted tweets, promoted accounts, and promoted trends to advertisers.

• Promoted Tweets: Promoted tweets are the regular tweets purchased by the advertisers who want their tweets to reach a wider group. Such tweets are clearly labeled as ‘Promoted’. Twitter uses proprietary algorithms to understand the interests of each account, that is likes, dislikes, and interest graphs, based on which promoted tweets are placed on the timelines of different users. These promoted Tweets are either pay-for-performance or pay-for-impression delivered advertising that is priced through an auction. It includes objective-based features that allow advertisers to pay only for the types of engagement selected by them like website clicks, mobile application installs or engagements, obtaining new followers, video views, and Tweet engagements (e.g., Retweets, replies, favorites, and likes). Promoted Tweets enable the brands to enhance their visibility.

• Promoted Accounts: Promoted Accounts are labeled as “promoted” and are used by advertisers to create and grow a community of users on Twitter who are interested in their business, products, and services. These are pay-for-performance advertising which is priced through an auction. Twitter makes suggestions to users about “Who to follow” based on the user’s demographics, preferences, location, and overall activity on the platform. This helps a newly set up brand or even an established brand to promote itself or to boost a new campaign. 

• Promoted Trends: Promoted Trends appear at the top of the list of trending topics for an entire day in a particular country or on a global basis and are labeled as “promoted”. Promoted Trends includes hashtags that become popular due to rising curiosity for the topic like #crypto. Twitter contracts Promoted Trend service on a fixed-fee-per-day basis.

Twitter also generates advertising revenue by charging advertisers for in-stream video ads delivered to a targeted audience and for sponsoring video content from publishing partners. The majority of the Promoted products sold to the advertisers are placed on Twitter, however, Twitter also generates revenue by placing a small portion of the advertising products on third-party publishers’ websites, applications, and other offerings.

In Q1 2021, Twitter generated $898.84 million by offering advertising services. Revenue from this segment has grown by 32% year-over-year from $682.19 million in Q1 2020. This increase in Advertising revenue indicates an increase in advertiser demand driven by a larger audience, better measurement and targeting, strong growth in ad impressions, increased demand for ads, product feature improvements, and improved ad formats. 

Data Licensing and Other.

Twitter generates revenue by offering data products and data licenses to companies and developers who get to access, search, and use historical as well as real-time data on the platform. Licenses are purchased to access all or a portion of data for a fixed period. Revenue from data licensing is recognized as and when the data is been used.

Apart from data licensing, Twitter also operates mobile advertising exchange services through MoPub exchange and collects service fees from transactions completed on the exchange. The mobile advertising exchange service acts as a link between the buyer and seller to purchase and sell advertising inventory, thus creating a match between buyers and sellers. 

In Q1 2021, Twitter generated $137.18 million that is 13% of total revenue. Revenue from this segment grew by 9% year-over-year from $125.45 million in Q1 2020. The increase was due to expanded partnerships in Developer and Enterprise Solutions (DES)

Company Overview

Twitter, Inc. is an American-based company established in 2006 by Noah Glass, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Biz Stone. Its headquarters is in San Francisco in California. Twitter, Inc. completed its initial public offering in 2013, and its common stocks are listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the trading symbol “TWTR”.

Twitter is a microblogging and social networking platform which allows users to post and interact via messages called “tweets”. The platform is used by individuals as well as businesses to publish their thoughts, share content, interact, and read breaking news. An unregistered user can only read the tweets whereas a registered user can post tweets of up to 280 characters and up to 2,400 times per day and can also like and retweet tweets.

Some of the companies acquired by Twitter are Gnip, Magic Pony Technology, MoPub, Periscope, TapCommerce, TellApart, and TweetDeck. Some of the major competitors of Twitter are Facebook, Pinterest, WeChat, TikTok, YouTube, Google, WhatsApp, Snap, Instagram, and QQ. 

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