Twitter Q3 2021 Earnings Call Transcript

There are 9 speakers on the call.

Operator

Good day, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Twitter Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions will follow at that time. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Christa Pessinger, VP, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Speaker 1

Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining our Q3 earnings conference call. We have Jack and Ned with us today. We published our shareholder letter on our Investor Relations website and with the SEC a couple of hours ago and hope that you've all had a chance to read it. As usual, we'll keep our opening remarks brief so that we can get right to your questions. As a reminder, we will also take questions asked on Twitter, so please tweet us at TwitterIR using the cash tag TWTR.

Speaker 1

During this call, we will make forward looking statements, including statements about our business outlook, strategies and long term goals. These comments are based on our plans, predictions and expectations as of today, which may change over time. Our actual results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties, including the risk factors in our most recent 10 ks and 10 Q and upcoming 10 Q to be filed with the SEC. Also during this call, we will discuss certain non GAAP financial measures. We have reconciled those to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures in our shareholder letter.

Speaker 1

These non GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. And finally, this call in its entirety is being webcast from our Investor Relations website and an audio replay will be available on Twitter and on our website will be in a few hours. And with that, I'd like to turn it over to Jack.

Speaker 2

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. A few highlights from me and Ned before we get to your questions. We had a solid Q3 with strong performance across revenue products in continued audience growth. Revenue was $1,280,000,000 in Q3 and we continue to see significant ad revenue growth, which increased 41% year over year this quarter.

Speaker 2

Average monetizable DAU increased to 211,000,000 are up 13% year over year with growth accelerating from an increase of 11% year over year in Q2. Before we get deep into the quarter and how we're looking at the rest of the year, as you may have seen, we announced that we agreed to sell mopub to Aplovin. First, I want to thank the MoPub team for all their hard work and contributions to Twitter and our customers who put trust in us and the MoPub team for many years. The sale demonstrates our confidence in our core revenue product strategy, allowing us to refocus our energy and resources on our direct response, SMB and Commerce Roadmaps. The last time we talked, you heard us talk about our intention to build an ecosystem of connected features and services focused on serving 3 core jobs, news, discussion and helping people get paid.

Speaker 2

In Q3, we launched products across all these categories, including ticketed spaces, tips, super followers and narrowcasting with communities. We also added the ability to pay your favorite creators using a variety of payment methods, including for the first time, Bitcoin. We continue to upgrade our machine learning systems as well, which are improving personalization throughout the product. We're just getting started, but already Twitter feels more responsive are intuitive. Lots more to come here.

Speaker 2

As we approach the end of the year, we feel confident about where we're headed. Overall, we're on course to leave 2021 a more focused accompany with clear priorities. And with that, I'll pass it over to Ned.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Jack. Q3 was a solid quarter driven by focus and execution. Total revenue grew 37% year over year at the high end of our guidance. MDAU grew 13% year over year to 211,000,000 With U. S.

Speaker 3

MDIU essentially flat quarter over quarter and up 4% year over year, both in line with our expectations due to the unusual comps from the pandemic surge last year, coupled with typical seasonality. We expect total mDAU in Q4 to grow at or above The Q3 rate of 13% on a year over year basis and we continue to believe the low point for year over year ngaU growth in 2021 was back in Q2 due to those tough comps. The impact of COVID remains fragmented across the world and we believe consumer behavior has yet to normalize. Despite these uncertainties, we remain optimistic given our healthy top of funnel, our conversion rate and our product roadmap, which allow us to serve more and more people every day. Let me share some of the highlights from the Olympics and our Doctor roadmap from Q3.

Speaker 3

The Olympics were a strong event for us. Olympics related tweets with video content reviewed more than 1,000,000,000 times on Twitter. There were 76,000,000,000 tweet impressions related to the Olympics and 12 of the 14 official Olympics sponsors advertise on Twitter. Our shift to direct response ads also made great strides. For MAP advertisers, We launched an updated learning period model that delivers more consistent campaign performance.

Speaker 3

And for website clicks, we introduced a multi destination carousel are testing and rolling out new features. Yet, we won't stop there when it comes to increasing focus on our most critical work. As Jack mentioned earlier and although it happened in October, it's worth are better monetizing our website and apps. The sale is expected to close in Q1 and while the associated product engineering and go to market teams are largely expected to shift to Doctor, SMB and Commerce upon closing. It will take time for their work to deliver results.

Speaker 3

We do not expect to recoup the full revenue loss associated with the sale of Mopub in 2022, which is estimated to be between $200,000,000 $250,000,000 Despite some expected 2022 revenue loss, there are no changes to our goal of generating $7,500,000,000 or more of annual revenue in 2023 with our increased focus and additional resources working on increasing our market share in the $150,000,000,000 and growing addressable market for ads on Twitter. I've also noticed there's been a lot of focus more broadly on the impact of the supply chain on the economy in general and advertising in particular. I'm pleased to share that our launch and connect value proposition continues to resonate with advertisers across the economy, with well more than half of our total ad revenue year to date are associated with services and digital goods. Let me also spend a moment on ATT. We continue to see opportunities around personalization on on Twitter as we better leverage our unique signal to improve people's experience and show them more effective ads across both brand and direct response.

Speaker 3

The have given the unique mix of ad formats, signal and remediations on each as well as other factors. The mitigations we put in place and the speed with which we've adopted new standards like the SKI network and resulting changes across our technical stack have contributed to minimizing the impact to us. Since the launch of ATT in April, we've invested in supporting the SKAd network, are opening up 30% plus more inventory and scale on Ios and launch support for view through attribution and SK campaign ID management features in the Twitter Ads Manager. It's still too early for Twitter to assess the long term impact of Apple's privacy related iOS changes, But the Q3 revenue impact was lower than expected and we've incorporated an ongoing modest impact into our Q4 guidance. We've seen our revenue product development, both related to and distinct from AT and T, improve the performance of our products and we expect that to continue.

Speaker 3

Let me quickly turn to a couple of points regarding our outlook. We continue to expect total revenue to grow faster than expenses in 2021, excluding the litigation settlement announced in Q3. And we expect to continue our investment posture as will announce in Q3 and we expect to continue our investment posture as we enter next year. We'll talk more about 2022 in February, but let me provide a little more context here. Our 30% plus headcount growth in 2021 with annual merit increases and other investments we've made in 2021, including our new data center, will flow into annual expenses for 2022, likely resulting in a mid-twenty percent increase in total expenses hear prior to hiring any more people or additional investments during 2022.

Speaker 3

We're pleased with our Q3 results We're excited about the momentum we bring with us into Q4. Let's go to questions.

Operator

Your first question is from Doug Anmuth from JPMorgan. Your line is open.

Speaker 3

Thanks for taking the questions.

Speaker 4

I have 2. First for Jack, how do you think about the path to returning to 20% growth in 2022 and 'twenty three. And which of the new products do you think will be most impactful here? And then secondly, Ned, just on the your comment you just made just about the increase in expenses. So Just to make sure we're understanding it right, you're kind of saying the expenses ending 2021 will take you to a mid-20s Percent increase flowing that through before you even hire anybody or add additional expenses.

Speaker 4

So that's a number that you'll update in 3 months? Thanks.

Speaker 2

Yes. Just to take the first question. Our greatest opportunity and potential for growth is around personalization and relevance. That is where we've consistently gotten the greatest gains in everything that we do and we intend to put a lot more emphasis here. This mainly speaks to our application of machine learning and general AI across every product surface that we have.

Speaker 2

But it also lends itself into some of the newer product surfaces and capabilities that we've been talking about, some for longer, some more recently, topics and interest continues to be a highlight. We have closed 12,000 topics now, 11 different languages, 230,000,000 accounts follow at least one topic. We're putting this closer and closer to onboarding. But this helps Everything. This helps our experience, the consumer experience.

Speaker 2

It helps our business because it gives us a signal with a ton of intent. Are expressing intent around a particular issue or topic instead of us having churn for it. And it also lays the foundation for the products that we want to create. So Spaces As an example of this, which we just rolled out to 100 percent of all of our customers, communities, which is the narrowcasting use case, Allowing people to talk specifically in what feels like a much smaller room about the topic's interest and that could be a location with My neighborhood, I think we will definitely see a lot of usage as people find new ways are having conversations that don't feel like they're tweeting to just the entire world and broadcasting it, but actually have a much tighter feedback loop Because we're talking about something that is locally interesting, whether that be a particular interest or it actually be a location or geography. So those Those are the ones I would point to.

Speaker 2

But the biggest impact will continue to be Personalization and this is an area where we feel we are behind, although we've put a lot we've gotten a lot of gains from it. That just really speaks to the potential. We have so much more work to do in terms of machine learning and just generally applying AI to every surface area that we have.

Speaker 3

Hey, Doug, just to add a little bit to that and get to your question on expenses. The top of funnel continues to be healthy all around the world for us, that is the folks haven't been on Twitter for a month or more, whether they've never been on Twitter before or they've tried it in the past, but haven't made it a part of their Daily ritual. So all the product stuff that Jack took you through plus that healthy top of funnel and all the events and topics that continue to bring people to Twitter all over the world, those are the components that build us up to that $315,000,000 number for the end of next year. When we put it out there in February, remember, We knew that this was going to be a year where we'd be lapping last year's pretty incredible growth and that Acceleration was required and so we now started that with 11% from Q2 going to 13% DAU growth in Q3. The second part of your question on expenses.

Speaker 3

So we'll give more color around 2022 in February as we typically do. But we just want to remind everybody, 1, our investment posture hasn't changed. And as we mentioned back in February, as long as we're on track hiring and investment decisions that we've already put to work, whether it's the data center or people who've already joined the company, When you roll those through the P and L for a full year, you add in merit increases and so on, you naturally get to This includes depreciation for the data center, for example, which doesn't start until you actually start to use the data center. You naturally get to the mid-20s. And so We're in the middle of the process where we sort out all the things that we want to do next year.

Speaker 3

And so I don't want to get in front of that, but we do want to continue to invest

Speaker 4

Great. Thanks for clarifying.

Operator

Your next question is from Justin Post. Your line is open.

Speaker 3

Great. Thank you. I would love to talk about progress you saw in the quarter with the MAP product, and I guess you're So maybe talk a little bit about that and how you see the opportunity. And second, you guided to 25% quarter over Quarter growth at the high end, which is pretty good comparably. Are you expecting the MAP product to kind of contribute Better growth than overall in Q4.

Speaker 3

Thank you. Hey, Justin, a couple of things on the revenue product side. First, we were pleased with our progress on MAP. A couple of ways to show it. One is MAP grew slightly faster than overall ads, which gives you a sense that are continuing to make progress there.

Speaker 3

We saw strength from some areas where we haven't always seen in the past such as travel, where launch campaigns as people begin to travel again from the travel advertisers grew 40%, a lot of that's tied to MAP. FinTech, They grew their spend 200% year over year with us. Food delivery, where a lot of that's pointing people to apps, that grew 140%. I'll give you a sense for where some of the strength is coming from. You mentioned shopping, so we now have business profiles to differentiate businesses from your account and mine on Twitter, where you can put your hours of operation, you can put your website.

Speaker 3

We will also make it so you can buy products straight from those profiles. So stay tuned for that. We've been experimenting with that over the course of this year. Also on the direct response side, the multi destination carousel is improving click through rates by 20%, which gives you a So we'll keep marching down that road map and with the sale of Mopub, we'll have more resources to put against it. Your second question around revenue guidance.

Speaker 3

So If you back out last year, which was by no means a normal year and you look at the 4 prior years, you see sequential growth in Q4 for us that was from the mid teens to the mid-20s. And so when you compare this to that, That $1,500,000,000 to $1,600,000,000 range, you can see that that's reasonably consistent with what we've seen in the past. We feel like we're entering Q4 with the wind at our backs, with the Olympics having got us off to a strong start in Q3, the Olympics went a little bit better than we had expected them to. From a revenue perspective, we were really pleased with how we were able to deliver for advertisers and the strength continued throughout the quarter across geographies, across formats, across verticals And with a great event calendar with lots of product launches in front of us, with that strong mix of services and digital goods that we talked about earlier, We feel like we've got a lot of momentum at our backs right now. Great.

Speaker 3

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question is from Rich Greenfield from Leithead Partners. Your line is open.

Speaker 5

Thanks for taking the question. I want to think about sort of a follow-up on Doug's question at the beginning. Sort of as you think about sort of the interest graph and sort of Jack's comments about sort of Understanding intent and I guess not just focusing on topics, but as you think about topics and shopping and signing up for newsletters, review, Commerce that you're starting, how does all of this play into sort of your longer term positioning on privacy And I'm not even just talking about iOS 14, but as you think about what Apple could do in the future, Google is looking at cookie changes, like How does all of this translate into like are you using any of it really yet to really target ads? Like where are you in that process? And as you think out of the next few years, how exposed are you to outside changes versus being able to leverage on platform first party data to target advertising effectively.

Speaker 5

Thanks.

Speaker 3

Yes. Hi, Rich.

Speaker 2

Relative to the signals we can get from it, it's quite small in terms of what we're using today. So Privacy is about making sure that people have an understanding of what data is being collected about them having control over that. We want to make sure that we're leading our peers in exactly that, but also making sure that we have much more Direct ways of people telling us what they're interested in and being able to follow a topic and interest is one such Being able to join a particular community to talk about an interest or topic is another way. These are all things that people are intently opting into, saying that they're interested in this particular thing gives us much, much stronger signal. It also gives us new surface area.

Speaker 2

If you consider what we can do with communities, which hasn't launched fully NVIDIA, we're testing it internally, But it gives us a surface area for advertisers who may just want to be shown around a particular topic instead of more broad based in home timeline. So it gives them a much safer space if they want to avoid particular topics or anything that might be political or not. And they have the ability to act on more intent, Not just the people that they're trying to reach. So that's ultimately what we want to drive. And It starts with the product itself and then making sure that we utilize those signals to deliver A person, individual, the most relevant ad or introduction to a product or service that they can imagine.

Speaker 2

And they'll tell us Whether that's valuable or not, as to whether they tap on it or purchase something, and all these things give us More information so that we can create a much tighter feedback loop, so that all these actions can positively reinforce one another. So Everything from spaces to the newsletters to following topics, all these things show And we have to depend less and less around inference in order to strengthen are relevant and get better signal.

Speaker 5

And where are you in terms of like if you and you said you're still in the that intent data and user data, to drive that. Like is that a 'twenty three event? Is it longer? Like how do we just think about over the next couple of years when we start to really see the best?

Speaker 2

Yes. I mean, I think One of our biggest priorities in the company right now is personalization. So we're going to put a premium on finding all the right signals to make sure that You're not just seeing more relevant ads, but you're seeing more relevant tweets as well. These have a very similar system. So I don't think it's all that far off and that we can start using more and more of these signals to increase the relevance of what we show.

Speaker 2

But this is the greatest opportunity for us in terms of relevance and that drives everything from

Operator

Your next question is from Mark Mahaney from ISI. Your line is open.

Speaker 3

Okay, thanks. I just I

Speaker 5

want to ask about unlocking small and medium sized business customers. I know you've stated it's a relatively small part of your advertiser base now, what do you think are the 2 or 3 things you need to do to really unlock that advertiser base? How easy is that to do? Sure, it's not easy, but the length of time it takes to do that, what do you think are the major reasons why they're not as engaged with you as they should be? Thank you.

Speaker 2

Yes. I think there's a number of things here. One is that we do have A lot of small businesses on Twitter, but we have not served them well, both in terms of the product and also the advertising capabilities. Doctor is a big part of this, making sure that we continue our move towards more and more performance based advertising. Self serve There's a big part providing an intuitive interface where a one person small business or sole proprietorship can actually come on to our system and understand how to reach the customers that they're trying to reach.

Speaker 2

And then there's a bunch of product surface areas that I think make this better, the topics that I keep talking about includes locations as well. So now we have in my hometown of St. Louis, Missouri as a topic I can follow. And again, that's intent that we can use as a signal. Communities is going to be a big part here As you consider topical communities, interest communities and also communities focused around particular locations, That's going to be an incredible surface area for small businesses.

Speaker 2

So there's some foundational work in terms of the performance direction that we're moving to, But also making sure that we are building something that ultimately is self serve for a small business. If they can open up the website and get to advertising right away and actually see value in it immediately, which means that they have really crisp and intuitive are analytics and then the more and more capabilities we have through the product, including our aspirations around commerce That helps with retaining and attracting new small businesses as well. We did we have been launching some things recently like the business profile, and there's a lot more to come, but all of these things will help the smallest of businesses will be able to utilize us and scale up as they move forward more so.

Speaker 5

Thank you.

Operator

Your next question is from Ross Sandler from Barclays. Your line is open.

Speaker 2

Hey, one for Ned and then one Jack, the U. S. Ad revenue looked really good in the Q3 plus 15 Q on Q, ahead of what Facebook and Snapchat reported in their U. S. Business.

Speaker 2

So is that Olympics or other factors? And do you think you're potentially picking up a little bit of share for these folks who are having much more significant problems around iOS 14. And then Jack, the shop module, just a follow-up on that last Question, that looks pretty interesting. Is this mostly this e commerce initiative A self serve process to get smaller businesses. How do you guys tap into some of the larger e commerce advertisers that are out there that are Spending tens of 1,000,000 of dollars or 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars, is there a big outbound effort in sales to tap into that?

Speaker 2

Just any color there. Thanks a lot.

Speaker 3

Hey, Ross. First on the U. S. Ads revenue. So we're really pleased with how we performed in Q3 in the U.

Speaker 3

S. In particular, a part of it is the Olympics, which we think went better than we had expected by a little bit. And a lot of that shows up in the U. S, certainly not all of it though. But as events began to come back, as people went back to stadiums, as they went back to theaters and other places, they continued to use Twitter and advertisers continued to use Twitter as a way to reach them, whether it's the $2,000,000,000 impressions we saw during the Video Music Awards or the $76,000,000,000 impressions we saw during the Olympics, these are just great examples of that and helping advertisers connect with their customers around a full baseball season in the U.

Speaker 3

S, around the lead up to the football season, both pro and college and all the highlights that we've got with every touch then now during the NFL and a lot of the commentary around this, those have been great opportunities for us in the U. S, but they're just some of the examples of what we've seen. And when we look at places like Japan, which grew 20% year over year, it's a powerful reminder The different economies are coming out of COVID at different times and went into lockdown at different points. And so although the year over years are going to be wonky for one reason or another, there's still lots of opportunity for us in other geographies where we have a sizable audience and great relationships with advertisers. Japan, as MAP continues to improve as they gradually come out of lockdown.

Speaker 3

We see lots of opportunity there just as another great example Where there's geographical opportunity for us. I'll turn to Jack on the second part.

Speaker 2

And this is commerce is an area where we want Start small and scale. So we want to make sure that we are building a great product that people want to stick with. And right now, the opportunity is around smaller, but that doesn't limit us later on from much, much larger retailers and are brands. I also think there's a lot of opportunity to partner a lot more so that people who already have e commerce solutions up and running with their inventory and tied into potential legacy systems where a lot of larger retailers have constraints around, that there's just one tap or one click to turn it on and turn that inventory onto Twitter as well. So we want to make sure that we're 1st and foremost building great products and then we'll look to scale it and then turn on more of the sales engines as you mentioned.

Speaker 1

Great. Thanks, Jack. And we're going to take the next question from Twitter. It comes from the account of Olivier Caza, and he asks, how does crypto fit into the global strategy at Twitter now? How has tipping and

Speaker 2

Well, so we just turned on Bitcoin tipping for tipping products before we had a number of third party services that people could use to receive tips. What makes Bitcoin interesting is that it is globally accessible. It doesn't matter where you are in the world. If you have a Bitcoin address to receive And your Bitcoin descends, specifically over the Lightning Network, you can do it. So it really opens up the aperture of who can instead of having to go market by market and look for services that operate with a bank subscriptions are new.

Speaker 2

These are products that we want to make sure that, again, we're starting small and we figure out the right product that people want And they're valuing every single day, and then we'll roll them out to more and more people and scale it will continue to iterate on the product. The progress of Review, which is our newsletter product, is a reminder of Why we did this? We want to make sure that Twitter is a place where you can express yourself in multiple formats, Will that be through short format updates like tweets, spaces, which is an audio conversation in real time for long form, which is review in the newsletter. The more we integrate this, the more opportunity and potential that we see. I think rather than looking at any one part of the equation, though, it's useful to consider the ecosystem, someone Being able to tweet out that they're going to host a space, add admission price for that space, which is what we call ticketed spaces, have and host the space, potentially be able to sell our products through commerce initiatives.

Speaker 2

And then after the space is complete writing newsletter to all their followers around ChowOne or a recap or any interesting insights. All these things positively reinforce one another and allows people to reach in entirely new ways. Some people might not be able to see the space, but they can get the newsletter, try to send back to the treats and so forth. So we're focused on the ecosystem model, the Connection between the parts is being the strength, not the individual aspects of it, and making them the strongest, but actually the connection between

Speaker 1

Thank you. Operator, we take the next question please.

Operator

Your next question is from Eric Sheridan from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.

Speaker 6

Thanks, Amit, so much for taking the question. I want to

Speaker 3

come back to a couple of

Speaker 6

the topics we've talked about before. Is there any way to size sort of the brand advertising up was derived from and maybe the same element with respect to direct response. When we think about what you've built so far to date As a revenue mix component in the business, how much of that is located in the U. S. Business versus more widely distributed globally?

Speaker 6

How should we think about that evolving in

Speaker 2

the years ahead? Thanks so much.

Speaker 3

Hey, thanks, Eric. So remember back at the Analyst Day, we mentioned that We had been 8515 brand Doctor in terms of ads on Twitter and that the long term goal is to get to fifty-fifty. We said it wouldn't be a straight line to get to fifty-fifty because for a variety of reasons we could see brand outperform Doctor in any given quarter or in any given year, but we think that over time that's the right mix for Twitter to be at. We feel like we've made really good progress having rolled out a new version of MAP, It's just not going to be a straight line from here to there. When you look across geographies, there are some that are inherently much heavier in One product or another, Japan being a heavier map market is a good example of that.

Speaker 3

Europe tends to be more map heavy as well. But a lot of this can change from one period to another, from one advertiser's campaign to another based on our product rollouts and improvements that we make. So we'll update that 8,515 mix annually. The next time will be in February. And Between then, we'll just continue to give you highlights and give you a sense for all

Speaker 2

the progress that we're making.

Speaker 6

Thanks, Matt.

Operator

Your next question is from Colin Sebastian from Baird. Your line is open.

Speaker 7

Good afternoon. Thanks very much. I guess, first off, I think in the letter, maybe you mentioned that the uptake with topics and communities has been quite strong with new users. Just wondering if you could talk about the pace of adoption among existing or legacy users as well opting into those newer features. And Ned, just one follow-up

Speaker 2

on the expense outlook.

Speaker 7

I don't know how many people you're retaining from MOPUB, but just curious how much of a normal hiring year that that amount of headcount might offset since we look into 2022? Thanks.

Speaker 2

Yes. On topics, we launched 2,300 new topics in this quarter. There's still a lot to do in terms of applying machine learning and personalization to it, both in terms of like being able to open up new topics much faster, but also enabling more relevance around the topics. A lot of The suites that I find most valuable these days are right in the home timeline and are introduced by following topics or a related topic that the system thinks I'm interested in. So I've discovered a ton that I wouldn't otherwise from just following accounts and doing all that work.

Speaker 2

So we do think it's really helpful, both in terms of retaining current users and giving them more of a breadth of what There's going to be a lot of momentum from that. However, I would say that our experience around it, the UI and just how to navigate it and understand it is still a little bit old. And the more work we do to make it feel more cohesive, make it feel like a less taxing browse experience being able to show and demonstrate tweets. Right there are a selection of tweets that you might see if you follow a topic, I think would help a lot. So right now, we're looking at the interface more cohesively.

Speaker 2

And Now that we have the core infrastructure working, it's just creating a much better experience from a UI perspective. Following the

Speaker 3

second part of your question on sorry?

Operator

Pardon me for interrupting, sir.

Speaker 3

No problem. The second part of the question was on No Pub. I'll just start around the expenses. So, Collyn, the thought is that we will reallocate as many people as we can, a lot of whom will remain at Twitter from MoPub to SMB to Commerce to Doctor more broadly that many of the go to market people will move to other parts of our sales organization and it will take time for their work to turn into revenue. So we don't expect to recoup all of that $200,000,000 to $250,000,000 but we do think that over time we can get back on track towards that 7,500,000,000 or more goal for 2023 and that will be on a more solid ground with more focus around monetizing Twitter than we have been before.

Speaker 3

And so from an expense perspective, this really doesn't change the picture for next year because we hope to have as many of those people as possible remain at Twitter. Of course, some will be going with mopeb, but most will be staying with us and moving to other work around monetizing Twitter.

Operator

Your next question is from Maria Ripps from Canaccord. Your line is open.

Speaker 1

Great. Thanks for taking my questions. Can you just elaborate on what Twitter did with SK Ed Network that made it more effective for you compared to Snap did seem to say that it was not as effective after initial testing. And then secondly, in the shareholder letter, you mentioned that you made it easier for new Customers to sign up or log in with their Google account or Apple ID. Can you just maybe talk about whether that was a noteworthy contributor user growth in the quarter and how do you sort of see this functionality supporting your efforts around user growth and engagement going forward?

Speaker 3

Thanks, Maria. So first on SKAdNetwork, it's hard for us to speak to what others have done. And a lot of this is that we're coming at these things from different angles. And so We continue to work hard to give advertisers reporting at whatever level customers allow us to around the success of their campaigns and the SVOD Network did a couple of things for us. One is it opened up more inventory where we hadn't been able to report report on them on an anonymized aggregated basis.

Speaker 3

2 is that we've worked hard to help the measurement partners have access to SCAD Network and did this early enough to make sure that people could benefit from it and advertisers can use that to the best of their abilities. There's just a lot of signal both from showing ads from different angles, maybe we implemented at different times, maybe the campaigns that we're reporting on are different, as such that this has had this ATT has had less impact on us than perhaps it's had on others who have a different mix or starting from a different starting point. The second question around single sign on. We're looking at all the ways that we can reduce friction and helping people get to what they're looking for on Twitter as quickly as possible. Single sign on is a great example of it where a lot of people have created accounts on Twitter over time, but they may not remember their password or maybe on a different device and everything we can do to get them into a timeline as quickly as possible or to help them find the conversations they were looking for as quickly as possible, we want to do.

Speaker 3

This has been a nice contributor and something that should continue to reduce friction over time for us, given how our top of funnel works for a lot of the people who come to Twitter have been on the service before, they just haven't been on it for a while. And every new at bat we get with them is an opportunity to show them how much better Twitter is than the last time they were with us. So single sign on is a great example of that. Jack talked about topics as another important lever. As those get closer and closer to onboarding, we're able to help people find the accounts that they want to follow or the topics that they want to learn most about through the process of showing them topics and refining are what accounts we suggest to them, refining what topics we suggest to them and get into value in their timeline faster than we were able to before.

Speaker 1

Great. That's very helpful. Thanks so much for the color.

Operator

Your next question

Speaker 1

is from

Operator

Brian Novak.

Speaker 1

Apologies, operator. I'm sorry. I think we have time just for one last question, so we'll make this the last one. Thank you.

Operator

Your last question is from Ryan Novak from Morgan Stanley. Your line is open.

Speaker 8

Great. Thanks for squeezing me on. Just I wanted to go back on performance, direct response and Sort of the ATT situation, can you just talk a little bit about how you're thinking about the next couple of years of performance in Doctor? It seems like in order for the business to get to be half of your revenue, it's going to be pretty sizable. So what investments are you making or do you see yourself making in 2022 and 2023 just to sort of minimize any potential disruption from AT and T signal loss and other Apple changes you've already made or you already have the technology in place?

Speaker 8

Just kind of we're going to think about that straight line, Ned.

Speaker 3

So Brian, one, because we have a smaller Doctor business and we're trying to grow it over time, it's not we're not There isn't signal that we've been leveraging perhaps to the same extent as others that we've lost. A lot of this is opportunity that's in front of whether it's the right to show people a more personalized experience on Twitter by asking their permission to do so after having built trust with them through how We show up as a company and how their timeline works and giving them the ability to turn off the algorithm at the top right of the app or other things that we do. Secondly, there's that signal that Jack was talking about earlier that we typically or historically just haven't leveraged as well as we can to show people map ads, to show them website click ads, to help them buy products or goods and services on Twitter. So It may just be that there's a lot of signal that is unique to Twitter that we haven't done as good a job of leveraging in the past as we expect to do in the future and with additional resources, with focus on monetizing Twitter, with the Doctor roadmap that we've laid out and talked about over the last few quarters, we're optimistic that we can continue to improve relevance of ads on Twitter, be it brand or Doctor, relative to are where we did in the past.

Speaker 8

Great. Very clear. Thanks, Ned.

Speaker 3

Thanks, Brian.

Operator

Thank you. And that does conclude our Q and A session for today. I'll turn the call back to CFO, Mr. Ned Segal for any additional or closing remarks.

Speaker 3

Okay. Thanks for joining us everybody. We appreciate your interest in Twitter. We look forward to speaking with you next quarter when we report Q4 on February 10th after the market closes. Until then, we'll see you on Twitter.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation and have a great day.

Earnings Conference Call
Twitter Q3 2021
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