Telecom Lead America: Social networking major Twitter has
generated more advertising revenue from its mobile platform than from its
website.
Facebook, its competitor in the social Internet arena,
faces intense pressure to improve its business performance on mobile.
Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said Twitter is making progress
in squeezing ad dollars out of the growing number of smartphone and tablet
users worldwide.
“We’re borne of mobile. We have an ad platform that
already is inherently suited to mobile, even though we launched our platform on
the Web and only started running ads on mobile recently,” said Costolo in
response to a moderator’s question about the difference between Facebook and
Twitter. He was speaking at an event in the U.S.
Twitter has 140 million monthly active users producing
400 million tweets daily.
The company has ramped up its revenue-generating efforts
since Costolo assumed the top leadership role in late 2010, according to agency
reports.
The company introduced ads into smartphone users’
timeline in February. The following month, Twitter released a feature allowing
advertisers to send promotional tweets specifically to iPhone and Android
users, who comprise 60 percent of all Twitter users, according to the company.
Twitter has closely held its revenue numbers.
Digital media analysis firm eMarketer estimated in
January that Twitter’s revenues could reach $260 million in 2012 and $540
million in 2014.
Facebook reported $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011.
Facebook to disappear in 5 to 8 years: Analyst
Recently, Eric Jackson, founder of Ironfire Capital, said
in five to eight years Facebook will disappear in the way that Yahoo has
disappeared.
Facebook has more than 425 million monthly active mobile users during December
2011, or about half of its worldwide user base.
Mobile users aren’t making Facebook any money at this point.
To address these concerns, Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion, and hired
the development team behind the Lightbox Android photo app.
