No One Cares That Twitter Inc Revenue Comes Mostly From Mobile

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Twitter’s business has turned mobile at a fast pace, and this is evident from the latest quarterly figures that the micro-blogging firm revealed on Tuesday. The company said that approximately $9 out of every  $10 it makes comes from mobile devices, especially from phones.

Mobile has been Twitter’s forte

In its quarterly report, Twitter said that about 86% of its advertising revenue comes from mobile. The micro-blogging firm earns almost all its revenue from advertising. A very small percentage of the company’s revenue comes from licensing historical tweet data through Gnip. Twitter generally sells in-feed promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts to advertisers.

Mobile revenue’s accounting for a very high proportion of total revenue is not new for Twitter. In the last quarter, revenue from mobile comprised 88% of Twitter’s revenue. When the company went public in 2013, revenue from mobile contributed just 65% of its revenue, and it had 75% of its users on mobile devices at that time.

Twitter working on many fronts

Twitter wants to expand the capabilities and the reach of all its products, for which it is putting in a lot of hard work. Following its arch rival Facebook, the micro-blogging firm too launched auto-play videos. Twitter’s self-service ad platform now reaches 200 countries around the world. It also made enhancements to its Twitter Audience Platform, which include new targeting methods and content formats.

In May, Twitter invested $22.6 million in TellApart, which is a retargeting company. The company seeks to bring retargeting capabilities to advertisers on mobile platforms, and for this it will make use of both people and technology.

Unfortunately, all the efforts that the company is making do not impress investors. Twitter’s stock dropped 10 points in after-hours trading after the company announced its third quarter earnings.

Disappointing investors again

For the third quarter, the user growth was again lower than expected, and Twitter also issued a depressing forecast for the holiday period. This concerned investors about the soundness of its advertising business, thus leading to a sharp decline in its stock price. Neither CEO Jack Dorsey nor company executives specified the reason behind softer revenue guidance, but they had indicated in the past that the company needs some time before it can show some meaningful user growth.

“Our focus is on three things: a more disciplined execution, simplifying our services and better communicating our value. We’ve made meaningful progress across all three,” Dorsey said during the earnings call.

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