Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Computing
  3. News

Twitter advertising revenue swiftly challenging MySpace

Molly McHugh
By

Twitter - revenueMarket 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.

Related Videos

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.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Instagram may be adopting this beloved MySpace feature
Instagram app on the Google Play Store on an Android smartphone.

Adding a song to a social media profile? That's not new, especially if you grew up in the MySpace generation. But it might be a new feature for Instagram as the photo and video sharing app has apparently been spotted working on a profile song feature.

According to screenshots posted by developer Alessandro Paluzzi as part of a series of tweets that began on Monday, Instagram appears to be working on a feature that could give its users the option to add a song to their IG profiles.

Read more
What is a Facebook Pixel? Meta’s tracking tool, explained
Meta, formerly Facebook.

If you have a website for your business and you're wondering how well your ads are reaching prospective customers, you'll probably want to be able to measure that to make sure that the money you've spent on advertising for your business is money well spent. Meta (the parent company of social media platforms Facebook and Instagram) offers a tool that can measure that by capturing how your customers interact with your business' website.

At one point, this tool was known as a Facebook Pixel. But since the technology company's recent rebranding to Meta, the tool also underwent a name change and is now known as the Meta Pixel.

Read more
Twitter begins testing new Spaces functionality for Twitter Communities
Twitter's Community Spaces feature on a mobile device.

Some fans of the bird app's recently launched Twitter Communities could see added functionality to the service today as Twitter begins testing a new feature for it.

On Wednesday, Twitter announced via a co-tweet, that it would begin testing a feature called Community Spaces (a combination of Twitter Communities and Twitter Spaces, hence the co-tweet between the Twitter Communities and Spaces Twitter accounts).

Read more