CHART: Twitter's US Ad Business Is Dwarfed By YouTube's And Facebook's

Despite often being viewed as a competitor to Facebook, Twitter's advertising business is relatively small.

In fact, Facebook, Google's YouTube, Hulu, and WebMD all have larger U.S. ad businesses than Twitter, according to company filings and BI Intelligence estimates.

(Note: the chart is not exhaustive and does not include data for Google, Yahoo, Pandora, AOL, etc. - it's meant solely for comparison's sake.)

The full analysis and data is only available to BI Intelligence subscribers.

This is how Twitter stacks up against some of its peers for digital ad dollars:

Here are some takeaways:

• Twitter generated approximately $91 million in revenue from U.S. ad sales in the second quarter of 2013. For comparison, Facebook's U.S. ad sales generated more than $720 million in revenue last quarter.
• WebMD generated roughly $106 million in U.S. ad revenue last quarter, significantly more than Twitter. That said, Twitter is growing much faster.
• Twitter's quarterly U.S. ad sales business grew 21% from the first quarter of this year, and 60% from the second quarter of last year.
• Over 65% of Twitter's ad revenue is generated by mobile devices

In our report on social media demographics, we noted how small Twitter's user base is, which caught a lot of people by surprise because of all the media attention Twitter attracts. Not only does Twitter's IPO filing confirm our suspicion, but it also reveals how small the company's ad business is in comparison to other top digital properties.

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