Twitter’s latest quarter shows mobile ads can work — big time

In its second quarterly earnings call since going public back in November, Twitter has beat everyone’s — even its own — expectations.

The company reported earnings of $0.23 per share on $250 million in revenue, beating average analyst expectations of a loss of 3 cents per share on $241.5 million in revenue.

This new quarter’s results confirm Twitter’s strong focus on mobile. The company revealed that 78 percent of its total monthly active users are mobile.

Moreover, mobile advertising was about 80 percent of total advertising revenue this quarter, for a total of about $180 million in mobile ad dollars. That’s a further signal that the company is doubling down on all things mobile — monetization included.

Some of its efforts this quarter included launching a mobile-focused native ad exchange on its MoPub network, which reaches over a billion people on iOS and Android, according to the company.

Earlier this month, Twitter vice president of engineering Alex Roetter said that the the company’s “focus is on being a mobile-first company.” This quarter’s results surely demonstrated that. 

On the monetization side, Twitter posted that while most of its revenue came from advertising, 10 percent came from “data licensing and other revenue,” a number that may see growth given the company’s very recent acquisition of Gnip, a reseller of Twitter’s user and activity data.

The company’s quarter before this one, Twitter brought in $243 million. During its last earnings call, the company predicted revenue would be in the range of $230 million to $240 million, and a little more than $1 billion for all of 2014. 

Twitter now has 255 million monthly active users, up from 240 million monthly active users last quarter. At the time, Twitter’s users posted over 300 million tweets per day.

The company’s stock closed at $40.73 yesterday, and has been up by a little under $3 so far today.

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