Twitter looks to mine user data to help sell advertising on other sites

Twitter is planning to mine data about its users to help sell advertising on other mobile apps or websites, as it tries to find new sources of revenue in the run-up to a stock market listing that could value the company at $15 billion (€11 billion).

Twitter announced the acquisition of mobile ad exchange MoPub in September for more than $300 million.

Once the deal closes, it plans to use data about who its users follow and what they tweet about to target ads beyond its own Promoted Tweets, according to people familiar with the plans.

The social media site’s advertising revenue has grown since 2010, when it first started selling Promoted Tweets, to reach $270 million last year.

But with $79.4 million in net losses, the company is not profitable and marketers still see advertising on Twitter as experimental.

Building an ad exchanges business with MoPub, advertising executives say, could solve two big challenges facing Twitter: a limited audience and a hesitancy to flood users’ feeds with too many ads.

The system will probably be more like Google’s advertising network than Facebook’s competing product. – (Copyright 2013 The Financial Times Limited)