Twitter dodges Apple changes, sales up 22% in the fourth quarter

Twitter’s sales jumped 22 per cent in the fourth quarter, signalling that the social network’s digital advertising business has held up even as changes to Apple’s data-collection rules hurt some larger rivals. 

Sales in the holiday quarter rose to $1.57 billion, compared with the $1.58 billion analysts had predicted. Revenue in the current period will be $1.17 billion to $1.27 billion, Twitter said on Thursday in a statement, while the average projection was $1.26 billion. 

The company added 6 million new users in the fourth quarter, bringing average daily active users to 217 million. That’s up 13 per cent from a year earlier, and was in line with estimates.

The lackluster revenue forecast is due in part to Twitter’s recent sale of ad platform MoPub, Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal said. MoPub brought in $281 million in revenue last year, including $51 million during the first quarter. 

Twitter sold MoPub to AppLovin for $1.05 billion in cash in a deal that closed on January 1. Employees who were working on MoPub have started developing other advertising products, Segal said.