Twitter CEO: we've got mobile advertising figured out
updated 05:19 pm EDT, Thu June 7, 2012
CEO says Twitter's mobile savvy is inborn
According to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, the company's strong mobile roots are the reason behind its success in the mobile advertising sphere. As AllThingsD notes, Twitter has rapidly succeeded where Facebook is still struggling, which could make for a struggle to determine the dominant social advertising platform for the mobile Internet. He attributes Twitter's success in the mobile sector to the fact that Twitter began as a mobile product.
Speaking at an Economist conference in San Francisco, Costolo pointed out that Twitter launched its ad platform on the web, and only recently began running mobile ads. Despite its newness, the mobile ad platform is already pulling in more revenue for the company than its web-based ad system.
Currently, 60 percent of Twitter's 140 million users access the service through a mobile device. That's up 55 percent from six months ago. Twitter's mobile users are also more frequent, more engaged users than those that access Twitter through a desktop or notebook.
Twitter's successes stand in marked contrast to the struggles of the world's largest social network to monetize its massive user base even as that base increasingly accesses the site from mobile devices. The two companies launched their mobile ad platforms around the same time, but Facebook has had a difficult time implementing mobile advertising, and the company doesn't pull in nearly as much from mobile as it does from PC advertising.
Twitter's mobile ad prowess is expected to push the company beyond early expectations. Sources familiar with the company's internal financial numbers recently revealed that Twitter's ad growth is on pace to hit $1 billion in sales by 2014.
