• by Tyler Loechner , Staff Writer @mp_tyler, February 6, 2015

Twitter released its Q4 2014 earnings on Thursday, reporting advertising revenue of $432 million, nearly double what it was one year ago. And mobile ad revenue made up 88% of that $432 million (about $380 million).

But how much of a factor was MoPub, the mobile ad exchange Twitter acquired for $350 million in late September? Midway through 2014, MoPub was growing a bit faster than people expected, and it was projected to account for roughly 5% of Twitter’s total revenue on the year as a whole.

Estimates suggest that's exactly what it did. Twitter said on its earnings call that their exchange business doubled year-over-year, “so if last year 4Q was $12mm, then this quarter it is $24mm, which would be around 5% of total,” remarked Brian Wieser, senior analyst at Pivotal Research.

Twitter's 2014 revenue was about $1.4 billion. About 5% of that would be $70 million. Initial estimates projected MoPub to account for anywhere between $56 million and $67 million.

The $70 million figure is just an estimate (Twitter didn't disclose exact figures surrounding MoPub's revenue), but since MoPub had been about 5% of Twitter's total revenue all year -- and since Wieser's math notes that it was about 5% again in Q4 -- the $70 million figure seems fair. It seems that at worst, MoPub's revenue landed somewhere within projections. 

The fact MoPub’s business is growing with Twitter’s is encouraging, and Twitter isn’t sleeping on the ad exchange. In its report, Twitter notes that last quarter it held its first mobile developer conference, where it unveiled monetization offerings through MoPub, among other things.

Twitter also recently rolled out its new developer platform, Fabric, to allow programmers to build and distribute apps, which can then be monetized via MoPub.

“By providing a ‘foundation’ for developer initiatives, [Twitter CEO Dick] Costolo said Fabric -- in unison with its MoPub ad-serving platform -- presented ‘enormous’ monetization opportunities,” wrote Social Media and Marketing Daily earlier this week in a piece covering Twitter’s plans to expand its Promoted Tweets offering.

MoPub continues to strike new partnerships as well, such as an integration with Marin announced earlier this week and a native-focused deal inked with Thinknear just last week.

Twitter’s tech stack is coming together. Now it just needs to deal with actual humans that use its platform in harmful ways -- something Costolo recently admitted the company “sucks” at doing.