Wednesday, September 18, 2013

Twitter bets on mobile advertising

In the midst of the big IPO news, Twitter has also recently bought a company by the name of MoPub for an estimated $350mn. MoPub is a start-up that helps mobile publishers manage their ad inventory, and essentially makes the monetization process simpler. This seems to have been a smart move for Twitter because it will only provide another avenue to build it's advertising business on mobile platforms, especially given the fact that last year Twitter started making more money on mobile advertising than desktop advertising.

MoPub was founded three years ago by Bryan Atwood, Nafis Jamal, and Jim Payne. They previously worked together at mobile ad-network AdMob (owned by Google). Over the years, they have raised ~$18.5mn in capital and have been backed by Accel Partners, Jafco Ventures, etc.  

Twitter has commented that they will continue to invest in and improve MoPub's business, however, it is currently unclear whether Twitter will become an exclusive customer of the service or not. CEO of MoPub, did state that he will become Twitter's vice president of exchange. 

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