Velti CMO guestimates Facebook could generate up to $2 billion a year from its mobile app

With news cycle ratcheting up prior to Facebook's IPO tomorrow, mobile ad company Velti sees good times ahead for Mark Zuckerbery's merry band.

Writing a column on Forbes, CMO Krishna Subramanian reckons that one banner ad on Facebook's mobile app could generate $2 billion a year.

Do the math

His calculation is a little back of the envelope, but it goes as such...

There are currently 83 million users of Facebook's mobile app. On average, they spend 441 minutes a month on the app.

So, if you served a performance ad impression every 60 seconds - with an eCPM of 50 cents - you'd generate $7.9 million per month.

Serving a premium brand advert, at $10 eCPM, would generate $158 million per month, however. (The assumption is that the slot is split between these two models as there's unlikely to be sufficient brand inventory.)

The combined result would be $1.99 billion in revenue per year.

Range of accuracy

Obviously, there are some interesting assumptions in this calculation; notably the 50:50 split between performance and brand advertising, and the frequency of ad rotation.

Perhaps, it would be more correct to say that Facebook could make between $95 million (for pure performance) and $2 billion a year.

That's not quite so catchy though.

[source: Forbes]