Facebook May Tout More Users, But Twitter Understands Mobile Ads

By Karla Robinson
September 10, 2012

Facebook has almost seven times Twitter’s number of monthly users, sitting at one billion compared with Twitter’s 150 million. But Forbes contributor Eric Jackson argues that Twitter is now in fact a bigger company than Facebook because of mobile ads.
According to eMarketer figures, Twitter’s 2012 mobile ad revenue is $129.7 million, compared to Facebook’s $72.7 million. In the world of social media, mobile ad dollars mean everything.
“The stock market is obsessed with who will make money in the mobile space because the stock market — correctly — believes that all of us (or 90+ percent of us) will only access these services from mobile devices in a very short period,” writes Jackson.
Facebook is “really only a PC-based ad company,” he suggests, adding that Facebook’s Payments business has also struggled due to the rapid shift in mobile.
Admittedly, Facebook only began selling mobile ads in the second half of 2012 but Jackson counters, saying “Twitter’s mobile ad sales were likely also light in the first half of the year.”
“Maybe Facebook is going to ramp things up in the future,” concludes Jackson. “But given that they’re 7x as big as Twitter and to have their heads handed to them like this from the quirky little San Francisco company, it’s embarrassing.”

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