Due to the company’s inability to monetize mobile users, the Facebook stock, which opened at $38 and is currently trading in the $26 range, has been pummeled since its May 18th IPO. Now, even as the stock continues to fall, Facebook’s rival Twitter has revealed their mobile revenues are strong.
Yesterday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo indicated mobile usage and revenues outpaced desktop users many days last quarter. The company, which only added the promotional tweet option for iPhone and Android users this March, has been able to rapidly monetize its mobile users. During a recent interview, Costolo stated that Twitter was initially created for mobile devices and that the microblogging platform is poised to have huge success in the mobile market:
“Because tweets are 140 characters, and born of mobile and constrained that way, when we designed the ad platform our ads would go everywhere tweets go, and the only way is if the ads are tweets. We have an ad platform that is already inherently suited to mobile. Even though we launched the ad platform on the Web already, a couple of weeks ago we saw mobile revenue in a day greater than non-mobile.”
In addition to the positive mobile revenue news, Costolo also revealed that Twitter now has over 140 million active users that produce 400 million daily tweets.
With Facebook struggling to capitalize on its large mobile user base, the news that a social media rival is producing strong revenues is sure to be unwelcome. Although Twitter does not release its revenue numbers, eMarketer estimates that the microblogging company will reach $260 million in revenue this year and $540 million by 2014. However, even if the eMarketer growth and revenue projections hold true, Facebook’s 2011 revenue numbers of $3.7 Billion are far greater.
Since Twitter has been able to monetize mobile users and Facebook is struggling in this area, is it a bad sign for Facebook? Or, do you feel that Twitter’s ability to monetize mobile traffic indicates that Facebook will eventually be able to do the same?
Sources Include: CNET & Reuters
Image used under Creative Commons from fortunelivemedia
