Twitter
TWTR
recently entered into a definitive agreement to sell its MoPub mobile advertising network to game developer and ad-tech company
AppLovin Corporation
APP
for $1.05 billion in cash.
The MoPub network is used by 45,000 mobile apps and reaches 1.5 billion addressable users. As part of Twitter, MoPub generated revenues of more than $188 million in 2020, representing nearly 5.9% of the advertising revenues.
The sale of MoPub follows
Apple
’s
AAPL
iOS 14.5 update in April that has made it difficult for advertisers to track user activity on their iPhones and iPads. The network allows companies to track ad inventory in real time, similar to
Alphabet
‘s
GOOGL
Double Click.
Twitter intends to utilize the proceeds received from the sale deal to build its owned and operated revenue-generating features and drive growth across key areas for the service including performance-based advertising, small and medium-sized business (SMB) offerings, and commerce initiatives. The sale is aligned with Twitter’s goal of reaching $7.5 billion in revenues by the end of 2023.
It will provide additional details on the estimated financial impact of the deal when it reports its third-quarter earnings on Oct 26.
Increasing Efforts to Attract Content Creators and Safeguard Users
Twitter is exploring new revenue streams that tap into explosive growth in the young content creator economy, sparked by the popularity of TikTok, Instagram and YouTube among others platforms with features like Super Follows and Ticketed Spaces.
Attracting and keeping creators and their audiences have become crucial for the tech companies battling to attract an audience and advertising profits.
Last month, Twitter enabled users to tip their favorite content creators with bitcoin besides third-party payment providers, as the network steps up its efforts to attract content creators essential to drawing crowds online. Besides Bitcoin, Twitter will let users connect nine traditional payment providers to their profiles to accept tips.
This Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company also plans to support authentication for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are digital assets such as images or videos that exist on a blockchain. The feature will let users track and showcase their NFT ownership on Twitter by allowing NFT creators to connect their crypto wallets to Twitter. You can see
the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here
.
Twitter also launched Clubhouse-like audio rooms, new interest-based communities and a number of experimental features designed to make the platform more interactive and safer.
The company is ramping up tools for users to keep exchanges on the platform civil, or avoid wading into unexpectedly contentious online conversations. Twitter also created new features like enabling users to edit follower lists and a tool to archive old tweets to restrict their visibility to others after a specific amount of time.
Moreover, the company has made a number of acquisitions this year so far including that of ad-free reading tool Scroll and popular newsletter platform Revue besides podcast app Breaker in an attempt to meet its top-line goals.
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