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Mobile display advertising is growing rapidly

by Scott Bicheno on 8 June 2011, 14:56

Tags: comScore

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Devices on display

With their acquisitions of AdMob and Quattro respectively, in early 2010, Google and Apple bet heavily on mobile display advertising being a major new revenue stream. A year and a half down the line that bet is starting to pay off.

New data released by ComScore reveals that the number of companies using mobile display advertising in the US has more than doubled in the past two years. Furthermore mobile content accounts for more than half of all products advertised on mobile devices.

"Although mobile advertising is still in its relative infancy, it is quickly gaining importance as new advertisers come into the fold," said Hans Fredericks, comScore VP. "As consumer usage and technology continue to advance, look for advertising to play an increasingly important role in the development of the mobile ecosystem."

689 advertisers used mobile display advertising campaigns in April of this year - 128 percent more than a year ago. Here's the breakdown the types of products advertised.

 

Percent of Advertised Categories via Mobile Display Advertising*
3 Month Avg. Ending Mar. 2011
Total U.S. Mobile Subscribers Ages 13+
Source: comScore Ad Metrix Mobile

 

% of Advertised Categories

Mobile Content and Publishing

50%

Consumer Discretionary

26%

Information Technology

7%

Financials

6%

Telecommunication Services

5%

Consumer Staples

3%

Industrials

2%

Other

1%

 

Unsurprisingly comScore concludes that smartphones are critical to the mobile advertising opportunity. But it is worth noting just how big the difference is in certain mobile data consumption activities between smartphones and feature phones.

 

Smartphone and Feature Phone Service Penetration
3 Month Avg. Ending Mar. 2011
Total U.S. Mobile Subscribers Ages 13+
Source: comScore MobiLens

 

% of Mobile Phone Users

 

Feature Phone

Smartphone

Used Browser

19.1%

82.3%

Used App**

15.9%

85.0%

Saw Ad on Web/In App

5.0%

27.5%

Responded to SMS ad

3.5%

7.7%

**Except native games

 

Meanwhile analyst In-Stat has predicted that mobile app downloads will reach 48 billion by 2015, by which time 45 percent of total phone shipments will be smartphones.

"The prevalence of handset touchscreens is a significant development impacting the mobile applications market," said senior analyst Amy Cravens. "The projected rapid penetration of touchscreen-enabled devices will allow more users to easily interact with mobile applications, thereby driving growth.  Increased on-board memory capacity will also lead to a better user experience."

 



HEXUS Forums :: 5 Comments

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Ya know what the best user experience for me would be? No pixels, bandwidth, and compute resources wasted on advertising.
aidanjt
Ya know what the best user experience for me would be? No pixels, bandwidth, and compute resources wasted on advertising.
Absolutely. I buy a phone for my convenience, not to give advertisers another route to pester me. The amount of advertising I want on my mobile phone is exactly the same as the amount I want on my home phone, which is 0% …. so this gives me another good reason for avoiding smartphones, or ad-phones as it seems they're intended to become.
aidanjt
Ya know what the best user experience for me would be? No pixels, bandwidth, and compute resources wasted on advertising.

…and no free stuff.
I find the adds on hexus forums annoying, but they are a hell of a lot less in your face than other uk tech sites.

As no one would be willing to do a direct payment access plan type thing, this is a good example of ads providing a ‘free’ service for us.

I hope this fact didn't escape anyone posting above. The option of the pay for no add is normally there in some form, people choose ad supported because it has certain advantages.
Indeed. If you want it for free then you put up with the adverts. I presume the developers aren't giving their work away. You pay for it one way or another.
To me the convenience of having, for example, a wifi monitor on my phone easily outweighs the loss of a couple of lines at the bottom of the screen and for the ones where you want all the screen real estate you can get like Dynomaster you can buy it for a few quid.

I'll put up with that for the functionality of a smart phone rather than go back to the single function phones we used to have.