Twitter sings the mea culpa again for a new error in the user count, although it is not the first time that it has happened, since in 2017, the company also came to recognize an excess of user count that added between one and two million additional users for three consecutive years.
The company has shared in its earnings release for the first quarter of the year, held this morning, that in these last three years it has counted too many users, considering the multiple accounts of the same user as independent usersthat is, as «monetizable daily active users», accounting for a excess of between 1.4 million to 1.9 million additional users each quarter.
As we can see, it’s another three years of wrong counts. The current bug started taking place from the first quarter of 2019 to the fourth quarter of last year. For the company, it is a technical error.
In this regard, the company was using the mDAU metric, developed by them and focused on giving advertisers a better idea of ​​the number of people who could become eligible to direct ads to them during a given period of time.
They realized the error at the moment in which they re-executed the numbers obtained under the indicated metric, observing that for the last consecutive quarters they had counted an additional number of users.
Despite the mistake, the company It has also recognized that average visits per day increased by about 10 million users compared to the last quarter, estimating the total number of users at about 229 million users for the first quarter of this year.
It is possible that this figure has changed in recent days with the turmoil mounted after the acquisition of Elon Musk, which everyone is talking about at the moment, and which has led some to consider alternatives such as Mastodon, or even Truth Social, which has been the number one download in the United States this week, while other alternatives are also being developed, such as the blockchain-based Panquake.
There is no doubt that there are many things to fix in Twitterand that perhaps in the Musk era they can be carried out, not only economically but also in many other aspects that directly affect users.
It will be interesting to see what changes they point out, although Musk is already testing some options in the last few hours, such as the integration of end-to-end encryption in direct messages.
