Twitter today reported its first quarter as a publicly listed company, and while the market may be punishing it a bit for slower overall user growth (despite handily beating financial expectations), Twitter’s mobile story continues to be a strong one.
Twitter said that mobile monthly active users stood at 184 million for Q4 2013, up 37% on a year ago. Given that overall users were 241 million, that makes mobile 76% of overall users. Twitter doesn’t break out how many of its mobile users are mobile-only, although they may spell out more detail on the earnings call later.
Crucially, mobile continues to grow faster than the bigger mix: overall user growth was up by only 30%.
The 3:4 ratio is also being reflected in revenues. Twitter says that mobile ads now make up some 75% of all of its ad sales. That works out to $165 million of the $220 million Twitter made in ad revenues.
The mobile story is one that Twitter plans to continue to push. In terms of revenues, acquisitions like MoPub are filling out its proposition with more sophisticated ad tech to expand how it works with third parties both on its own platform and beyond.
On the product side, the company continues to add more features to the mobile platform both to give it more parity with the desktop experience (yesterday’s addition of favorite and retweet counts being one example), and to maximise ways of playing up location and other mobile-specific features.
Interestingly, if you compare Twitter to Facebook, Twitter continues to lead the world’s biggest social network in terms of how its pushing sales on the mobile platform. Facebook’s quarterly earnings reported last week were the first time that the company has managed to tip into making more from mobile ad sales than desktop (at 53% of all ad sales).
If you compare today’s numbers to those from Twitter’s S-1 filings leading up to its IPO, the company mobile story is definitely getting bigger. The first S-1 put mobile revenues at 65% of all ad sales, although later those got revised up to around 70%.