Twitter has surpassed Facebook in revenue

Market research agency eMarketer has released a report on the amount of revenue from mobile advertising in the United States. According to the forecast, by the end of 2012, Twitter will earn almost 2 times more on mobile advertising than Facebook.

In 2012, Twitter’s revenue in this market will be $129.7 million, while Facebook’s revenue will reach only $72.7 million. And this is despite the fact that Facebook’s monthly audience in the United States (70 million users) is twice as large as the entire Twitter audience (32 million). As eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson comments on the data, “the convenience of advertising is a very important aspect, and the essence of the microblogging service is just easy integration with mobile devices.”

Experts see the reasons for Facebook’s low revenues this year in the late launch of the social network on mobile devices and Twitter’s high adaptability to forms of mobile advertising. But Facebook will surpass Twitter by $114 million in 2013, as predicted by eMarketer: $387 million (that is, Facebook’s revenue from mobile advertising will grow more than 5 times in a year) against Twitter’s $273 million).

Although both companies are quite far from the undisputed leader in revenue: Google occupies more than half of the US mobile advertising market and its revenue will reach $1.4 billion by the end of this year, and by the end of 2013 – $3.6 billion, eMarketer estimated.