Twitter to Earn More Money from Mobile than Facebook
Central to the drama over Facebook's ever decreasing share value has been how they will monetize their mobile users. Earlier this summer it emerged that not only were mobile revenues at Facebook poor, but also that social networking rival Twitter are doing pretty well from their mobile users.
This stark contrast was exemplified by reports today that Twitter is now actually making more money from mobile advertising that its much larger rival. A report from eMarketer estimates that Twitter will hit $129.7 million in U.S. mobile ad revenues this year compared to $72 million for Facebook. This is despite Facebook being valued at four times the valuation of Twitter.
However, as you can see from the figures above, eMarketer do expect Facebook to rapidly close the gap on Twitter, and indeed overtake them in revenue next year. It should be remembered of course that only last month eMarketer slashed its earnings forecast for Facebook, so how accurate their prediction proves to be remains to be seen.
The predictions will offer some hope for investors in Facebook however, who have seen their shares battered since flotation earlier this year. As the research firm points out in the report, Facebook only launched its first mobile ad units in June and still has plenty of room to grow.
“Mobile is a long-term play for Facebook, and by next year, eMarketer expects the social networking giant to beat out Twitter by a significant margin, taking in $387 million on mobile in the US.,” the firm wrote in its report.
Overall, eMarketer predicts the mobile advertising market will hit $2.61 billion this year in the U.S. and grow to a $12 billion industry in 2016 due largely to companies like Facebook and Twitter.
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