This is the second time Twitter has miscalculated its users’ numbers, after discovering in 2017 that a similar bug had gone unnoticed for three years. The latest bug was revealed a few days after Twitter agreed to a leverage acquisition by Musk. The businessman hints at plans to reform Twitter’s business model, which currently relies on advertising for more than 90 percent of its revenue. Given the deal, Twitter’s first-quarter earnings report offered minimal commentary and included no guidance for the rest of the year. The company is also giving up the usual video conference with analysts. First-quarter revenue of $ 1.2 billion was slightly lower than Wall Street forecasts, which Twitter blamed for the “anti-winds associated with the war in Ukraine.” However, day-to-day active revenue-generating Twitter (mDAU) users, his own unique measure of audience tracking, outperformed investors at 229 million, up 6.4 percent year-over-year. US and 18.1 percent in the rest of the world. Net income jumped to $ 513 million, thanks to a one-time profit from the $ 1 billion sale of the MoPub mobile ad unit to AppLovin, which closed in January.

Shares of Twitter rose about 1 percent to $ 49.05 at the start of trading, down from $ 54.20 per share in which Musk agreed to buy the company. Twitter also revealed what it described as an “error” introduced in the first quarter of 2019 and “led to an overestimation of the mDAU” that remained unknown for almost three years. The difference between the figures reported by Twitter last year and the actual number ranged between 1.4-1.9 million, he said, or just under 1 percent of the total. It did not provide an agreement for 2019 or most of 2020. Advertisers rely on accurate estimates of audience size when designing their campaigns. “In March 2019, we launched a feature that allowed people to link multiple different accounts together for easy switching between accounts,” the company explained. “An error occurred at this time, so the actions performed through the master account resulted in all linked accounts being counted as mDAU.” Fake or unwanted accounts accounted for “less than 5 percent” of its mDAU during the quarter, Twitter said after an internal review. Musk has said he intends to crack down on “bots” or fake accounts when he takes over. In 2017, Twitter was forced to reduce previously reported user data from 2014 to 2 million per quarter, after discovering that it was accidentally measuring activity from third-party applications as sole users.