Twitter has released their earnings release for the second quarter of 2020, reporting a growth of 34% YoY in Monetizable Daily Active Usage (mDAU) at $186 million, thanks to the increase in conversation around current global events. Revenue, however, was recorded at $683 million for Q2 2020, which calculates to a decline of 19% compared to the same period last year.
The COVID-19 pandemic caused a significant decrease in global advertising expenditure, which led to decline of 23% YoY in advertising revenue for Twitter, totaling at $562 million. This contributed to the decline in total revenue for the company. Total expenses were recorded at $807 million, which is an increase of 5% YoY, and this calculated to a net operating loss of $124 million and -18% operating margin.
Commenting on the report, Ned Segal, Twitter’s CFO said:
Revenue was $683 million in Q2, down 19% year over year, reflecting moderate recovery in advertising demand relative to the last three weeks of March. Despite the pandemic, brands have found innovative ways to join the conversation on Twitter to connect with their customers. We have completed our ad server rebuild and are making progress accelerating our performance ads roadmap. With a larger audience and progress in ads, we are even better positioned to deliver for advertisers when the live events and product launches that bring many people and advertisers to Twitter return to our lives.
In related news, Twitter recently suffered a social-engineering attack, that led to them temporarily block all tweets from verified accounts.