Twitter Now Seeing 400 Million Tweets Per Day

June 7, 2012 | Filed under: Technology | Posted by:

This article originally appeared on Forbes.com.

Twitter just keeps on getting bigger. And, perhaps, has finally cracked the nut that continues to hang over the platform’s head: profitability.

Speaking at The Economist‘s Ideas Economy: Information 2012 event yesterday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo revealed a couple of juicy tidbits about the state of the micro-blogging platform, circa June 2012. One, that Twitter is now seeing a heady 400 million tweets per day. And two, that mobile advertising surpassed the company’s non-mobile revenue stream for the first time two weeks ago.

Back in March, Twitter reported 340 million tweets per day, so the current number represents an impressive upsurge of almost 18 percent in less than three months. That’s a huge leap.

At the event, Costolo, pressed about the differences between Twitter and Facebook in light of the latter’s disappointing IPO, which have exposed its struggles to monetize its mobile side, stated that Twitter’s mobile users are “more active and log in and use the service more frequently”, which no doubt has played a part in the big uptick in daily tweets. Twitter, which started life as a mobile SMS service before becoming a web-based platform that spawned dozens of smartphone apps, has always had a natural, organic fit in the mobile space, and could reap the profits accordingly.

“We’re borne of mobile,” said Costolo. “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.”

“(Twitter ads are) inherently suited to mobile because Tweets are suited for mobile. Even though we launched first on the web and only started to run on mobile a few months ago. It’s already been the case a couple weeks ago that mobile ad revenue in a day was greater than non mobile. Mobile revenue is already doing delightfully well.”

Good stuff. Of course, I’ve never clicked on a Twitter ad, mobile or otherwise. But, much like Facebook ads (or, historically, those on Google), enough people clearly do to make it something of considerable value to brands and, ultimately, Twitter itself.

Bottom line: the faster the bird gets to profitability, the better it is for all of us who like and use it.