• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, May 1, 2014

Analysts appear to be largely in agreement that Twitter cannot disappoint with another set of quarterly results showing large losses without at least a radical rethink. The accusation remains that the company launched and then floated as a micro blogging site with an audience skewed toward the media and technology industries, and that is still what it is today. 

This is what makes the integration with the MoPub in-app exchange in Q2 such an interesting move. Mobile is the elusive golden egg that Facebook has yet to crack -- and so setting up Twitter as the starting point for campaigns that can then run on MoPub is not only convenient, it should see more budget spent on the ad exchange heading in Twitter's direction too. One can presume it will also lead to Twitter apps being redesigned to include a new bar (a bottom banner?) to house in-app advertising? With earnings of circa $226m a quarter now from advertising, the integration move appears to make a lot of sense and will almost certainly move the site north of a billion dollars worth of advertising revenue per year.

Yet will it be enough to keep investors off its back? Shares fell to below their initial float price with the announcement of
Twitter's latest results this week.

Investors would appear to be losing patience with waiting for the service to evolve and begin posting bigger numbers, although it has only been publicly traded for six months.

However, with Facebook and WhatsApp claiming more than a billion and a half regular users between them, Twitter remains roughly a sixth the size of its co-joined, rival social media giant. 

So in the next quarter, it will be fascinating as Twitter lays out its position as being the channel to reach out to targeted second-screener audiences -- and at the same time, from a very different angle, to be the central starting point to mass market in-app advertising campaigns bought through its MoPub exchange. 

Second-screen focus and in-app mass appeal. An interesting pincer movement that will need to begin producing better results by the end of Q2 -- or at the very least, show promise it is about to.