Mobile advertising will be worth $3.5 billion in 2010

Rating: Informa says Apple & Google to blame for growth

The latest research from Informa Telecoms & Media says that revenues from mobile advertising in 2010 will be worth $3.5 billion globally. It attributes the strong growth over the past 12 months to initiatives from the big players – chiefly Apple and Google. In particular Informa reckons that the launch of Apple’s iAd advertising platform has forced its rivals to speed up their own mobile advertising strategies. By 2015 revenues should have grown around eightfold to circa $ 24 billion, the company estimates. The biggest losers will be the mobile network operators whose share of the pie will have shrunk.According to Informa, operators’ share of mobile advertising revenues will fall from around 26 per cent this year [2010] to around 20 per cent by 2015.

Shailendra Pandey, a senior analyst with Informa, comments, “Google has responded by acquiring AdMob and has announced it is on track to generate US$1 billion in revenues from mobile in 2010 – a significant portion of which will be mobile advertising revenues.”

The last time GoMo News wrote about that AdMob acquisition somebody complained it hadn’t gone through yet. So let’s hope it has now.

Anyway, Informa also reports that Google has seen a 500 per cent growth in mobile search queries between 2008 and 2010.

In theory those searches can be translated into ad revenues, if mobile surfers click in the right places.

To counter the threat from the likes of Google and Apple, a number of mobile operators have launched services or trials to encourage their subscribers to opt in to mobile advertising.

In return subscribers receive reward points in exchange for viewing ads on their mobile phones.

The list of operators testing the waters in this way include Orange, O2 UK, Movistar Spain, VimpelCom Russia, Maxis Malaysia and Claro Argentina.

Pandey reckons that the mobile advertising industry has moved ahead from the trial and experimental phase. Now many brands are spending significant sums on mobile campaigns on a regular basis.

” It is becoming quite clear to the operators that close partnerships with other value chain players is essential and is a better strategy than attempting to build an in-house mobile advertising solution and their own creative and sales teams,” the report observes.

The company’s overall conclusion is that the mobile advertising market will go through a sustained period of consolidation over the next 12 to18 months.

The big value chain players who have been on the acquisition trail for companies, will now attempt to seamlessly integrate mobile with their own platforms. The objective being to have an end-to-end mobile ad-serving capability.

So mobile advertising is def the place to be, then.