Have you noticed more ads on your mobile phone applications, or in other places while using a mobile device? A couple of years ago, analysts said that mobile advertising would rise to a billion dollar industry and over the last two years, the growth is certainly headed that direction. Mobile advertising has a long way to go when compared to where television or online advertising markets are today. As more and more people are getting into the Smartphone market, mobile advertisers will want to have their eyes on ads as much as possible.
ComScore has a new report out with some interesting statistics regarding the growth of mobile advertising. In one month, namely April of this year, almost 700 advertiser’s setup mobile ad campaigns and that is a 128 percent increase over the last two years. Part of the increase is said to have come because mobile advertising networks are popping up more, which gives advertisers more places to campaign for the much valued eyes of mobile users. Of all of the ads that were placed seven percent of them were for information technology companies and only 6 percent of them were for financial services.
On the flip side of the coin, the largest piece of the mobile advertising pie went to ads for mobile content and publishing, which took up 50 percent of the ads. ComScore also reported that about 26 percent of the ads placed were for “consumer discretionary goods”. Other ads placed covered companies in the “consumer staples”, “industrials” and “telecommunications services”, coming in at 3%, 2% and 5%, respectively.
One factor that will always play a key role in mobile advertising is the advancement of the Smartphone. Smartphone users are 70 percent more likely to access their mobile browsers or applications that a regular “feature phone” user. Almost 28 percent of the Smartphone users that accessed their mobile browser saw more ads than those of feature phones. Smartphone users were also more likely to respond to SMS (or text) advertisements, 7.7 percent versus 3.5 percent of feature phone users.
Even though unlimited data plans have been going away slowly, Smartphone users are still getting online and putting their eyes on mobile ads. As this increases, the number of mobile networks and advertisers is going to increase over time. The mobile ad industry will become a multi-billion dollar industry like online display advertising, it’ll just take some time.
