Twitter has said it spent $33m (£27m) on Elon Musk’s proposed deal to buy the social media firm between April and June 2022.
It also said its number of monthly daily users had risen to 237m, but it reported a net loss of $270m, which is worse than expected. Mr. Musk changed his mind about the purchase of the social network, and a court date is now set for October 2022 because Twitter wants to force through the sale.
There is a $1bn termination fee potentially at stake. Twitter declined to discuss its latest financial results, citing the “pending acquisition” as the reason. The report covered the period from April 2022 to June 2022.
Reason for Termination
Twitter doubled-down on its position on the amount of spam and fake accounts on the platform, the reason Elon Musk gave for terminating the deal.
“We have performed an internal review of a sample of accounts and estimate that the average of false or spam accounts during the second quarter of 2022 represented fewer than 5% of our [monthly active users] during the quarter,” Twitter revealed, although it added that the figure is an estimate.
In 2021, Twitter’s revenue was $5bn (£4.2bn), but in the last 12 months, its share price has fallen by 45%. According to an Analyst, Mike Proulx, from Forrester, Twitter is in “purgatory”. “Twitter now has an acquirer who no longer wants it, a CEO and board who wants to get rid of it, and an employee base which is caught in the middle of it all,” Proulx said, adding that “The real victim from all this drama is Twitter itself”.
Another Social Network
On Thursday, July 21, 2022, Snap, which owns Snapchat, reported revenue of $1.11bn for the three months to the end of June, which missed Wall Street expectations. The firm’s shares slumped by more than 25% after the news.
It said some of its advertisers cut their spending, on the basis that they are faced with rising costs. It also said it is being affected by a change made by Apple last year, which meant iPhone and iPad users could opt-out of being tracked by apps. This affected the personalisation of ads, which is a very valuable service to tech firms because they can no longer see their users’ other online activities and tailor advertising accordingly.
On the part of Twitter, its ad revenue increased by just 2%, to $1.08bn. Meta and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is due to report its earnings next week.
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