Twitter Ad Revenue to Almost Triple in 2011

In order to maintain a large scale platform up and running, one requires serious finances, and Twitter is no exception. Relying on ads to earn revenue appears to have been an inspired choice, since the network is expected to have gained $139.5 million in the ongoing year.

This means that the ad revenue of this microblogging service has gone up 210 percent compared to 2010, when it got a mere $45 million.

These figures have been revealed in a study published by the research company eMarketer which focuses on analyzing and interpreting digital marketing data.

More than this, eMarketer estimates that by 2013, the revenue Twitter gets from its ad service will round up to almost $400 million.

It seems that this ascending trend started when Twitter launched Promoted Products in April 2010 which turned out to be quite successful in the US.

Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at eMarketer, explains that “[m]arketers have shown solid engagement rates with Twitter advertising—in some cases better than those on Facebook—despite Twitter’s relatively smaller audience.”

Since it aims a different target audience, Twitter is currently used by only 100 million persons (as opposed to the 800 million users who have at least one Facebook account), thus making it harder to monetize it.

But the company has already taken several steps to make sure their revenue gets stabilized, and that their advertising system pays off from other countries than the US.

They have recently opened their first international office in Ireland and others are supposed to follow, so as to allow the social network to earn up to 12 percent ad revenue from non-US markets by 2013.

During 2011, 96 percent of ad profits come from the US alone where advertisers got the chance to appreciate and put to use the value of Promoted Tweets and Promoted Trends.

In this context, it is safe to assume that Twitter is on the right path to growing into a profitable corporation and that its 144-character posts will still be around for more years to come.