Twitter Sees Its Mobile Revenue Grow

Growth is just one difference between SF-startup and Facebook.

Twitter is no Facebook, at least according to Twitter CEO Dick Costolo.

The San Francisco-based social-networking site that allows use to send message up to 140 characters is being looked at as one of the next big tech startups that could go public.

Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey has gone on record saying the company is in no hurry to go public.

And after seeing Facebook trading losses in the hundreds of millions, Twitter's path to an IPO might take a slight detour.

Costolo said at a conference hosted by The Economist Group in San Francisco even when his company goes public, it's fate could be quite different than Facebook.

First Twitter's 2012 revenue is estimated to be somewhere in the $260 million range, while Faceboook reported $3.7 billion in revenue last year.

Costolo also told the audience that Twitter is already doing well at the one thing Facebook listed as a weakness in its S1 filing.

"We're borne of mobile," Costolo said when explaining the difference between his company and Facebook. "We have an ad platform that already is inherently suited to mobile, even though we launched our platform on the Web and only started running ads on mobile recently."

He added that often last quarter Twitter generates more advertising revenue on mobile platforms than its website.

The company is also a lot smaller than Facebook. Twitter has about 140 million monthly active users while Facebook has more than 900 million registered users.

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