Twitter net income dropped 20 percent in Q4, but the company posted revenue gains for both the quarter and the year, up 22 percent to $1.57 billion for the three months ending December 31, and 37 percent for the year, which closed at just over $5 billion. Net income was $182 million in Q4, versus $222 million in 2020, due to increased costs in areas such as hiring and marketing. Twitter announced a $4 billion stock buyback and said it would maintain its aggressive Q4 2023 goal of 315 million monetizable Daily Active Users (mDAUs).

The earnings report was the first under CEO Parag Agrawal, who assumed the post following the November resignation of Jack Dorsey, whose aggressive forecasts he inherited. Twitter CFO Ned Segal described in the company’s earnings release “a solid fourth quarter to finish 2021.”

“Our strong 2021 performance positions us to improve execution and deliver on our 2023 goals,” said Agrawal, keeping the focus forward-looking. Segal added there would be “no changes to our goals of 315 million average mDAU in Q4 2023 and $7.5 billion or more revenue in 2023.”

Twitter had a 2021 net loss of $221 million, a huge improvement after back-to-back years of $1 billion-plus losses in the income column. User numbers were up across the board:

• Q4 closed the year with 217 million global monetizable Daily Active Users (mDAUs), up 12 percent from the end of 2020 for a gain of 25 million
• Q3 to Q4 addition of 6 million mDAUs worldwide (+2.8 percent)
• 38 million U.S. mDAUs as of December 31, an increase of 1 million (+2.6 percent) over 2020
• 179 million international mDAUs as of December 31, an increase of 24 million (+14 percent) over 2020
• Q3 to Q4 gain of 5 million international mDAUs (+2.8) percent

Twitter “added new users, potentially easing concerns that it was having a hard time drawing interest in an increasingly diverse market for social media,” reports The New York Times.

According to CNBC, Twitter has seen “25 percent year-over-year growth in new account sign-ups or reactivation and a 35 percent year-over-year increase in daily sign-ups.” Segal attributed the sign-up surge in part to “strategies like encouraging users to sign in when they come to Twitter from a different platform.’”

Segal said Q4 revenue “was impacted by a slowdown in advertiser spending in the last couple of weeks of the period. But he said spending has picked up moving into Q1,” per CNBC. In general, the company — which said in Q3 that Apple’s iOS ad-hindering privacy changes “had less of an impact in the period than expected” — noted in its Q4 shareholder letter that the impact “remained modest.”

“Some 85  percent of Twitter’s ad revenue comes from brand ads, which are less affected by Apple’s changes than direct-response ads,” WSJ said Segal told them in an interview. Quarterly ad revenue was up 21 percent year-over-year, to $1.4 billion, leaping nearly 34 percent to $4.5 billion for the 12 month period, per company financials.