The full quote doesn't do SparkToro and Followerwonk any credit:
> Followerwonk selected a random sample from only those accounts that had public tweets published to their profile in the last 90 days, a clear indication of “activity.” Further, Followerwonk regularly updates its profile database (every 30 days) to remove any protected or deleted accounts. We believe this sample is both large enough in size to be statistically significant, and curated to most closely resemble what Twitter might consider a monetizable Daily Active User (mDAU).
The fact that they don't even consider the concept of a non-tweeting lurker to be an mDAU brings their entire analysis into question. Let's face it - Twitter is an emotionally-charged enough place, and tweets have such a way of living forever and being taken out of context, that there are many who use it to consume (and perhaps Like) content but will not tweet publicly. These people are still viewing and engaging with advertisements! Twitter absolutely should consider them monetizable!
But of course, engagement data on lurkers is internal only, and Likes data counts against global API caps: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/tweets/lik.... Which means that SparkToro and Followerwonk are incentivized to ignore these users. That they do ignore them, and don't address it anywhere in their methodology, is highly suspect.
> Followerwonk selected a random sample from only those accounts that had public tweets published to their profile in the last 90 days, a clear indication of “activity.” Further, Followerwonk regularly updates its profile database (every 30 days) to remove any protected or deleted accounts. We believe this sample is both large enough in size to be statistically significant, and curated to most closely resemble what Twitter might consider a monetizable Daily Active User (mDAU).
The fact that they don't even consider the concept of a non-tweeting lurker to be an mDAU brings their entire analysis into question. Let's face it - Twitter is an emotionally-charged enough place, and tweets have such a way of living forever and being taken out of context, that there are many who use it to consume (and perhaps Like) content but will not tweet publicly. These people are still viewing and engaging with advertisements! Twitter absolutely should consider them monetizable!
But of course, engagement data on lurkers is internal only, and Likes data counts against global API caps: https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/twitter-api/tweets/lik.... Which means that SparkToro and Followerwonk are incentivized to ignore these users. That they do ignore them, and don't address it anywhere in their methodology, is highly suspect.