Twitter doesn’t need Donald Trump to keep growing. The company said today that it ended 2020 with 192 million daily users, and the number continued to grow in January – the month when Trump was banned from the platform. Twitter did not offer a specific daily usage figure for January, but said the user’s daily growth was “above the historical average for the past four years”.
Details were given in Twitter’s fourth quarter 2020 earnings release, which covers October through the end of December 2020. This means that the release would not normally mention January information, but Twitter said it was offering the details “given unusual circumstances this quarter. It is not clear how much Trump’s presence has driven the use of Twitter over the years, but the expectation was that having the President of the United States as a regular user would probably be beneficial for Twitter.
While Trump’s ban may not have had an immediate impact, Twitter warns that its growth will slow down. The company says that after “our tremendous growth in 2020”, the numbers for 2021 will look a little worse. During the first three months of 2021, Twitter expects to increase daily users by 20 percent year on year, down from 24 percent in 2020. Twitter expects growth in the “low double digits” for the rest of the year, with the second quarter being the lowest point. Twitter says the slowdown is due to the “significant increase related to the pandemic” in usage last year.