Twitter has announced that revenue from promoted tweets on mobiles, which were introduced in February, have now overtaken revenue from PCs.
The announcement was made by the firm’s CEO Dick Costolo, who claimed that 60% of the microblogging site’s 140m users now accessing via mobile devices, up from 55% at the beginning of the year.
Speaking at The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Information event in San Francisco, Costolo said advertising on the Twitter platform is “inherently suited to mobile because tweets are suited for mobile, even though we launched first on the web and only started to run on mobile a few months ago. It’s already been the case a couple weeks ago that mobile ad revenue in a day was greater than non-mobile.”
Costolo credited the growth of Twitter’s mobile ad initiatives to increasing mobile engagement, noting that the majority of the microblogging platform’s users are on wireless devices. “[Mobile] users are more active and log in to the service more frequently,” he said.
Costolo declined to divulge actual revenue totals.
Earlier this year, research firm eMarketer estimated that Twitter is on pace to generate revenues of $260 million in 2012 and $540 million in 2014.
Twitter expanded its Promoted Accounts services to its iOS and Android applications this February. Promoted Accounts are suggested based on a user’s public list of whom they follow. When an advertiser promotes an account, Twitter’s algorithm examines the account’s followers and identifies other accounts that those users tend to follow. If a user follows some of those accounts but not the advertiser, Twitter recommends the Promoted Account to that user.
The following month, Twitter introduced new customization options enabling advertisers like mobile app developers and content publishers to roll out campaigns designed expressly for specific Apple iOS, Google Android and Research In Motion BlackBerry devices, pinpointing consumers who are most likely to purchase their products. Twitter also enables brands to use Promoted Tweets to target mobile users that share similar interests with their existing followers.
Costolo added that Twitter has no immediate plans to go public. “I just don’t worry about that stuff… if you wait until the business and business results speak for themselves, you can be a public company on your own terms,” he said.
In other news, Twitter has announced it is currently hosting about 400m tweets per day, up from 340m one month ago, with mobile users more active than those on PCs.
In the UK, Twitter now has 10 million users, 80 percent of whom are logging in on a mobile device, will soon begin promoting tweets in users’ messages.
Independent studies reveal that the UK is the fourth-largest territory for the micro blogging site, after the US, Brazil and Japan.
Four out of five UK Twitter fans – which is an impressive eight million of the 10 million active UK users – log in using a mobile device, compared with an average of 55 percent elsewhere in the world.
