Twitter mobile revenues to beat Facebook by $57m

It seems Twitter is winning the race to make money from social media on smartphones, with projected revenues of $130m in mobile advertising revenues for 2012, according to eMarketer, the market research company. 

This is bad news for Facebook, which expects to make just $73m on mobile for the year. Facebook has been open with its shareholders about the problems it faces generating revenue from mobile. On-screen space is scarce on the small mobile displays, but Facebook has resisted cluttering its app with ad banners – so far. But an increasing proportion of its 955 million users access the site using their mobile.

Whilst bosses at Twitter will be pleased with their progress, the figures are still a long way behind online monoliths such as Google, which saw revenues of $750m from its mobile users in the US last year. eMarketer reckons the figure will double for 2012, generating $1.42bn and taking up almost 55% of the total mobile advertising market in the States. So Facebook and Twitter have got some serious catching up to do, whatever happens.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will be racking his brains: his website has almost twice as may users as Twitter and yet they’re in the lead. Very frustrating stuff, eh Mark… 

This article was first published on managementtoday.co.uk