Today Twitter announced its daily active user count for the first time in five years. (Actually, it announced a slightly-altered version daily active users, in an unsuccessful attempt to dodge unflattering comparisons to peers.)
Turns out the company that once hoped to build “the planet’s largest daily connected audience” claims only 126 million daily users — just 8% as many as Facebook, and also far behind Instagram, Snapchat, and other social platforms.
Surprised? You shouldn’t be.
In 2013, 47% of Twitter’s monthly users visited daily. The company’s pre-IPO filings reported 215m monthly active users and 100m daily active users — meaning 46.5% of Twitter’s monthly users visited each day.
That percentage had fallen. Companies don’t stop reporting positive data. While Twitter stated daily users in its S-1, the company stopped publishing this number soon after. It was clear the daily-to-monthly ratio had gone down.
In 2018, 39% of Twitter’s monthly users visited daily. Nineteen Insights pegged Twitter’s daily-to-monthly ratio at 40-45% — a meaningful but not catastrophic decline from its pre-IPO percentage. We were pretty close: 126m daily active users is 39% of Twitter’s 321m monthly active users .
This actually represents a significant recovery. Twitter revealed it had just 109m daily users in Q1 2017 — 33% of its monthly users. But daily usage has grown as monthly usage plateaued: By Q1 2018 its 120m daily users represented 36% of monthly users. Now the ratio is back up to 39%.