You already know that Twitter (NYSE: TWTR ) and Facebook (NASDAQ: FB ) are competing intensely for your eyeballs and subsequently advertiser dollars. Both companies operate social content feeds populated with ads, albeit with different value propositions.
In numerous ways, Twitter is much smaller and much younger than Facebook. However, comparing their actual businesses is a little tricky since they don't use the same reporting metrics.
Facebook reports average revenue per user, or ARPU, which is a fairly common monetization metric. Facebook used to report "Likes" as a proxy for engagement, which the company has since stopped doing. This is likely because it was a poor proxy to begin with, and "Likes" were at risk of becoming Wall Street's newest metric. No analyst wanted to begin modeling projections for "Likes."
Twitter, on the other hand, does not specifically disclose ARPU. This is where the legwork comes in.
A numbers game
Using the same methodology that Facebook does, investors can calculate Twitter's ARPU by dividing advertising revenue by the average number of monthly active users, or MAUs, during a given period. On a worldwide basis, Facebook is monetizing users over twice as effectively.
