On August 4, 2022, in connection with the pending acquisition of Twitter, Inc. (“Twitter”) by an affiliate of Elon Musk, Sean Edgett, Twitter’s General Counsel, sent the following email to Twitter employees:
Team,
Today we filed a response to counterclaims raised by our acquirer, stating that we believe his claims are factually inaccurate, legally insufficient, and commercially irrelevant. You can read it in full here, as well as our updated FAQ doc here. For those who get questions from clients or partners, this main FAQ can help you respond as well.
Additionally, we had the opportunity to request redactions in the counterclaim upon Musk’s public filing. We chose not to redact any information–we fully stand behind our SEC filings, the methodologies we use to calculate mDAU, and our statements about the percentage of spam accounts on our platform.
As you all know, we offer our customers a highly sophisticated set of tools and features to run and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns across our platform, with a foundation of transparency and strong ROI. We will continue to work closely with our advertisers and partners to ensure that the false claims in this countersuit do not distract from our best-in-class customer service, client solutions, and commitment to brand safety that we have always delivered.
Thanks,
Sean
Twitter Acquisition: Tweep FAQ
Updates as of August 4, 2022
What is mDAU?
| ● | | Twitter defines monetizable daily active usage or users (mDAU) as people, organizations, or other accounts who logged in or were otherwise authenticated and accessed Twitter on any given day through twitter.com, Twitter applications that are able to show ads, or paid Twitter products, including subscriptions. |
| ● | | Monetizable means they could see ads or pay Twitter through a subscription, not that they will see ads on any given day. As our filings state, they are on a monetizable client or application. |
How does Twitter determine mDAU?
| ● | | When an account logs in or is otherwise authenticated on Twitter on any given day through twitter.com, Twitter applications that are able to show ads, or paid Twitter products, including subscriptions. |
| ● | | Average mDAU for a period represents the number of mDAU on each day of such period divided by the number of days for such period. Changes in mDAU are a measure of changes in the size of our daily “logged in” or otherwise authenticated active total accounts. |
Why do we measure mDAU?
| ● | | Audience metrics are seldom one size fits all but some form of daily active usage is a typical metric in our industry. Different products have different definitions they employ tailored to their specific service. |
| ● | | mDAU (monetizable daily active user) is designed to be our baseline to gauge broad usage and growth on the Twitter platform. |
| ● | | Monetizable means they could see ads or pay for a subscription, not that they will see ads. They are on a monetizable client or application. |
| ● | | We are committed to providing something valuable to people on Twitter every day. |
| ● | | As stated in our SEC filings, “We believe that mDAU, and its related growth, is the best way to measure our success against our objectives and to show the size of our audience and engagement.” |
| ● | | Our goal is not to disclose the largest user number we can but rather one that has more relevance. mDAU is designed to provide relevance and context to external stakeholders that reflects our goal of delivering value to people on Twitter every day and monetizing that usage. |