Ahead of Twitter’s IPO filing, the key figure anticipated by investors was the company’s average revenue per user. But when the time came, Twitter didn’t disclose it. Instead, Twitter revealed data about how often users view their timeline, or stream of tweets, and how much Twitter earns for every 1,000 timeline views. Those unusual metrics make it difficult to compare Twitter to other publicly traded social networks, like Facebook.
But it turns out we can calculate Twitter’s average advertising revenue per user using the other data it disclosed. See below for the full explanation and math, but it comes to $0.55 in the quarter that ended in June. That compares to Facebook’s $1.41 of average advertising revenue per user over the same period.
In its filing, Twitter also noted that it earns substantially more revenue from its American users ($2.17 per thousand timeline views) than those outside the United States ($0.30).
Advertising accounts for 85% of Twitter’s revenue. The other 15% comes from data licensing. Because of that, its total average revenue per user would be slightly greater than 55 cents. Similarly, Facebook earns additional money from payments, so its total average revenue per user was $1.60 in the quarter that ended in June.