Unlike Facebook, Twitter’s mobile revenue rivals the desktop

It seems that Twitter has done an exceptional job when it comes to monetizing its mobile audience.

Not only that, but Twitter CEO Dick Costolo said the startup often generates more revenue from mobile usage than desktop, according Reuters.

“We’re borne of mobile,”  Costolo said at an industry event hosted by The Economist Wednesday. “We have an ad platform that already is inherently suited to mobile, even though we launched our platform on the Web and only started running ads on mobile recently.”

The revelation is good news for investors, especially in light of Mary Meeker’s recent report indicating that mobile monetization is poor among web properties. It’s also good news for people who want to distinguish Twitter from newly public Facebook.

Facebook has had its fair share of criticism lately when it comes to monetizing its mobile audience. As VentureBeat’s Jennifer Van Grove previously pointed out, the average U.S. Facebook user spent 441 minutes (or just over 7 hours) accessing the social network’s mobile properties in March compared to 391 minutes on the desktop. Despite these numbers, Facebook admits its only generating a fraction of its total revenue from mobile users. (To give you some perspective, Facebook generated a total of $3.7 billion in revenue in 2011.)

While Twitter’s revenue is currently estimated to be about a fourth of Facebook’s, this distinction of properly monetizing its audience will become more important as the company inches its way toward going public.

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