Twitter Hits Peak Revenue As Downloads Continue to Drop

2023 has been a very strong year in mobile revenue for Twitter. The last time I looked at revenue, in March, Twitter hit a new all-time high.

Now that April is behind us, let's have a look at Twitter's revenue from the App Store, where most of its revenue is coming from, and see where it's heading.

It's heading up high!

According to our estimates, Twitter's App Store revenue continued to grow in April and hit a new peak of $3.5M. And that's net, meaning what Twitter gets to keep after giving Apple its share.

This new haul is 13.5% higher than March, which is a pretty decent growth rate. It's not breaking any speed records, but it's also very healthy and far better than what we've seen from Twitter pre-Elon.

I know Elon is very controversial and I'm sure someone will point out how this revenue isn't worth the drop in advertiser revenue. If I looked at Twitter's overall revenue this would be an interesting argument, but I'm only focused on app revenue because that journey is fairly new to a platform like Twitter and will likely serve as the template for other companies.

So far this year, Twitter's mobile revenue grew 118%, according to our estimates.

But that's only one half of the story. The good half...

In downloads, Twitter's trend is heading in the other direction. Down.

According to our estimates, Twitter's iOS app made its way into 3.8M iOS devices in April.

Twitter is plenty popular on Android but to align with where revenue is coming from, I'm only looking at the App Store here.

That's a decent amount of downloads, but it's 17% lower than March. When compared to January, the drop is even higher -- 32%.

Completely ignoring politics, Elon's direction, or the latest competitor trying to take users away, growing revenue while downloads are dropping isn't bad. At all.

A big userbase of non-paying users can be a goldmine when monetized correctly, and a good reminder to developers that if you're not thinking about monetization, regardless of which stage you're in, you're leaving money on the table.