A research firm predicts that Twitter will earn nearly $ 1 billion in advertising revenue in 2014, largely on the strength of mobile ad sales. The figure exceeds the firm’s earlier predictions and reflects Twitter’s ongoing emergence as a force in mobile marketing.
According to eMarketer, Twitter will pull in $ 528 million this year and $ 950 million in 2014 with 53 percent of that money coming from mobile ads. The firm had earlier pegged the 2014 number at $ 800 million.
There are two takeaways from these figures. One is the obvious observation that Twitter is killing it, and fulfilling predictions that it will become a media and advertising behemoth. The other is that Twitter is one of the only companies to crack the mobile morass — the problem, faced by many websites, in which users are moving to mobile devices but ad dollars are not.
Twitter is sitting pretty here because its mobile experience is highly conducive to so-called “native ad units” (sponsored or promoted tweets) that drop easily into its regular story flow. Twitter’s surging mobile numbers could also bode well for Facebook which is ramping up its own advertising efforts, and will likely expand options for marketers to drop “sponsored stories” (another type of native ad unit) into its mobile News Feed.
The other figure that jumps out from the eMarketer report is how much of Twitter’s ad money still comes from the U.S. The firm says that the figure was 90% in 2012 and predicts it will be 83% in 2013.
Twitter continues to hire high profile figures to drive advertising ambitions; in February, it announced the hiring of Jeffrey Graham, a Googler and former New York Times executive.
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