Twitter advertising revenue swiftly challenging MySpace

Market research firm eMarketer believes that Twitter could take in $150 million in advertising this year – more than three times the advertising revenue it saw last year. The analysts believe that most of this money will come from US companies and that next year, Twitter could be raking in as much as $250 million in advertising.

Surprisingly, MySpace was able to just barely outdo Twitter’s advertising income with $184 million, but the flailing company’s revenue has been consistently slipping, and it won’t be able to hold any lead for long. It’s projected to only pull in $156 million next year, versus $288 million this year.

While there’s nothing shocking about the fact that MySpace is in a slump, Twitter’s success is significant since the social networking site only recently jumped into advertising. Only after taking its time to establish and refine its platform did it start working on its business and promotional tools. But once Promoted Tweets, Promoted Trends, and Promoted Accounts came on the scene (amid mild and swiftly extinguished outrage), Twitter’s revenue exploded.

Social networking advertising revenue in general has experienced significant growth this year, EMarketer found that $6 billion will be spent on advertising in 2011, and that this number will jump to $8.1 billion next year. Facebook, naturally, is well ahead of the pack, and estimated to hold and grow this lead in the coming years. Still, the growth that Twitter is experiencing is very reminiscent of how Facebook shot to becoming a top advertising space, and also seems to be following a similar formula allowing businesses to mold their campaigns within the social network’s confines. Clearly, it’s working, and we expect to see Twitter’s advertising revenues coming in second only to Facebook in the next five years. It’s just one more slight against MySpace, which continues to lose any edge it once had over newcomer competition.