This week, Twitter confirmed their purchase of the mobile-focused advertising exchange MoPub for an estimated $350 million in company stock. This is the single largest acquisition for Twitter in the history of their company.
MoPub lets mobile application publishers manage and optimize multiple sources of advertising like direct ads, house ads, ad networks, and real-time bidding. Thus, Twitter plans to use their technology to bolster their advertising options to help reach an overall goal of $1 billion in revenue by 2014.
“The two major trends in the ad world right now are the rapid consumer shift toward mobile usage, and the industry shift to programmatic buying,” says Kevin Weil, VP Revenue Product. “Twitter sits at the intersection of these, and we think by bringing MoPub’s technology and team to Twitter, we can further drive these trends for the benefit of consumers, advertisers, and agencies.”
In addition to reaching their $1 billion goal, Twitter is looking to utilize MoPub’s advertising technology to build real-time bidding into the Twitter ads platform. That would allow Twitter’s current advertisers to easily automate and scale their buys.
The long-term approach by Twitter to only show useful and interesting ads to their users will not change because of this acquisition. They will, however, continue to invest in and improve the core business of MoPub to extend many types of native advertising across the mobile ecosystem.
