Facebook Warns That Mobile Revenue Will be Poor
How Facebook will make money from their mobile traffic has been a constant question since it emerged that more people are accessing the site via their phones than they are their computers recently.
The focus is not helped by recent news that mobile advertising on Twitter is doing tremendously well, with the company seeing impressive revenue growth.
At Facebook however the picture is not so rosy. They recently issued a revenue warning over its mobile growth and lack of ability to monetize this traffic.
A large part of the problem is that Twitter's ad platform was built with mobile in mind, whereas Facebook treated it almost as an after thought.
According to Angus Wood, the group director for paid social media at iProspect, Twitter has a significant head start on Facebook as its advertising platform was 'built for mobile from the off'.
"Twitter never created a specific advertising space but allowed people to pay to promote their tweets on the existing service," Angus Wood, group director for paid social media at iProspect has said.
"It baked the commercial part of its venture into the service from the off. And also the Twitter.com experience is nearly identical to that of the mobile app," he continued.
"However, Facebook created a traditional display advertising media platform - in a similar vein to Yahoo and MSN - which doesn't easily translate to mobile," he added.
Whilst it is premature to write Facebook off, there is clearly some way for them to go before they can safely say they have cracked mobile advertising.
With shareholders to please however it is a battle that they must eventually win if they are to flourish financially.
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