Twitter’s US ad business will grow by 38.5% in 2021

According to a new report from eMarketer, Twitter’s ad business in the United States will grow by 38.5% in 2021 to reach $2.35 billion, after sluggish growth of 5.8% in 2020. The report also found that Twitter’s share of the US digital ad market, just 1.1%, will remain stable, increasing to 1.2% next year.

For the third quarter of 2021, Twitter said its total global advertising revenue was $1.14 billion, up 41%, meeting revenue estimates. Investors had expected that Twitter would be relatively safe from Apple’s privacy changes, as most of its advertisers did not trust highly targeted ads.

Twitter’s monthly user base in the US will also peak at 56.4 million in 2021, but will slowly start to decline in the coming years, according to eMarketer’s forecast. Twitter’s US user base grew by 4.1% to 56.0 million users in 2020, the highest growth since the 4.2% jump in 2015. By the end of this year, growth is expected to return to a pre-pandemic rate of 0.8%.

Twitter reported that Average monetizable DAU (daily active users) reached 211 million worldwide in Q3, up 13% year over year, accelerating from 11% year over year growth in Q2.

eMarketer also expects Twitter to lose 1.1 million US users by the end of 2025. The 35-44 age group will fall the most, with around 500,000 drops between now and the end of 2025. Age 65 and over is the only age group to see a slight increase in users over this time frame. All other age groups will drop slightly or stay the same.

“Twitter’s challenge now is to retain the users it gained during the pandemic,” said Jasmine Enberg, eMarketer senior analyst at Insider Intelligence. “The company has been steadily rolling out new features from subscriptions to live audio and even a live shopping event to keep users engaged and coming back to the platform.”

In September, Twitter started to roll out its premium subscription feature, Super Follows. 

In mid-November, Twitter announced that it ​​is acquiring Threader, a third-party freemium app which allows users to compile Twitter threads, to further improve its $2.99 monthly paid subscription product Blue.

Also Read: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey steps down

This isn’t Twitter’s first acquisition this year. Announcing its Revue and Breaker acquisitions in January, Twitter also announced last month that it has acquired the group chat app Sphere.