Twitter acquires mobile advertising firm MoPub for a reported $350 mn

Twitter yesterday said that it acquired mobile advertising firm MoPub, in order to beef up its advertising business ahead of its initial public stock offering, for an undisclosed sum.

Though the two companies did not disclose the financial terms of the deal price, online IT journal TechCrunch reported that Twitter paid $350 million.

Based close to Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco, MoPub's technology lets mobile application publishers manage their inventory and optimise multiple sources of advertising - direct ads, house ads, ad network, and real-time bidding.

MoPub was founded in 2010 by Bryan Atwood, Nafis Jamal, and CEO Jim Payne, who earlier worked at Google's AdMob.

Explaining the rationale of the acquisition, Kevin Weil, Twitter's vice president for revenue products said in a blog post, ''The two major trends in the ad world right now are the rapid consumer shift toward mobile usage, and the industry shift to programmatic buying. Twitter sits at the intersection of these, and we think by bringing MoPub's technology and team to Twitter, we can further drive these trends for the benefit of consumers, advertisers, and agencies.''

Twitter plans to use MoPub's technology to build real-time bidding into its own ads platform.

The microblogging site, which generated $583 million in 2013 through advertising, according to eMarketer, is trying to increase its advertising revenue ahead of its initial public offering next year.