Social networking giant, Facebook (News - Alert) (News-Alert) may enjoy higher popularity, but when it comes to mobile ad sales, Twitter (News-Alert) has stomped the ‘giant’.

eMarketer, an independent market research group, published a staggering report recently stating that Twitter will earn almost twice the revenue for mobile ad sales in 2012 as Facebook in the U.S., which is  the largest ad market for both the social networking groups. However, the report also projects a rosy picture for Facebook’s future for 2013, predicting that the social networking giant will garner a brilliant five times more hike, in mobile advertising revenue. 


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While that’s not saying much, as Google (News - Alert) (News-Alert) and Pandora (News-Alert) have been selling mobile advertisement for couple of years now, and have beat both these social networking companies. Most prominently, Google dominates; thanks to its effective mobile search ads, which comprises of more than half of all the mobile advertisements in the industry. However, for display ads, Google is hardly ahead of Pandora (News - Alert).

This year, the numbers are predicting that Google will make about $1.4 billion in mobile ad revenue, Pandora, a staggering $226 million, Twitter at $130 million, Apple (News - Alert) at $75 million, and Facebook standing at the lowest, for now, at $72.7 million. However, eMarketer does not annoy Facebook, projecting that their revenue from mobile ad sales will increase to a whopping $387 million next year, just following Google with a projected mobile revenue of $2.4 billion in 2013.

The numbers are big and more important, because experts believe that mobile advertising is integral for a lucrative future of many web based companies. This is mainly because more and more people are using their tablets and smartphones to browse the Internet, instead of the traditional PCs and laptops. The eMarketer team projected a $12 billion revenue for the overall mobile ad market in the United States. 

The report has been headlined with the finding that this year, Twitter will bag almost twice the mobile ad revenue as Facebook, its major rival in the industry. Both the groups are working upon launching new advertisement applications, targeting the mobile advertisers, aimed at building higher revenue from the same. Twitter claimed that they generated bigger revenue from mobile users than web users on most days, while Facebook has been expertly criticized for moving rather slowly in grabbing onto the mobile ad world in US.

Twitter is built from the ground up to be very easy to use on mobile devices, said Debra Aho Williamson, the principal analyst at eMarketer. She added that while it makes sense that advertising is a better fit for Facebook, it has, however, been a learning experience.

However, eMarketer do not completely gives a ‘thumbs down’ to Facebook, expecting that the leading social networking site will catch up with the competition, bringing a huge surge in mobile ad sales revenue in the coming year. This will push it to the second position after Google, which is still the indomitable leader in mobile ad revenue.

Meanwhile, it is better to wait and watch whether the projections from eMarketer turn out to be true. Facebook also reported that they have closed the deal to buy Instagram, a renowned photo-sharing service, which the company hopes will appeal more to the mobile users.

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