Twitter Buys MoPub For $350M In Run Up To IPO

Yesterday TechCrunch first reported that MoPub had been acquired by Twitter for roughly $350 million. That number was not confirmed by either company however.

MoPub is a real-time-bidding mobile ad exchange for apps that falls into the category of “programmatic” ad buying.

The acquisition brings technology and a third party mobile developer/publisher network to Twitter. MoPub said yesterday in a blog post that nothing would change for its publishers and that Twitter would help it strengthen its services.

Twitter was pretty clear about what it was after in buying MoPub:

The MoPub team has built a leading mobile ad exchange, and their focus on providing transparency to advertisers and publishers aligns with our values. We’ll continue to invest in and improve their core business. In particular, we think there is a key opportunity to extend many types of native advertising across the mobile ecosystem through the MoPub exchange.

We also plan to use MoPub’s technology to build real-time bidding into the Twitter ads platform so our advertisers can more easily automate and scale their buys. We’ll maintain the same high quality standards that define our platform today. Our approach is to show an ad when we think it will be useful or interesting to a user, and that isn’t changing.

In May of this year MoPub announced it had reached a $100 million “run rate.” Twitter’s mobile ad revenues are somewhere north of $300 million according to several estimates.

The company’s mobile revenues are greater than its PC-based revenue. However Twitter is very much like Facebook in that ads can be rendered across platforms without significant changes or impact on the user experience.