Global mobile ad market growing faster than expected, will be worth US$11.4 billion in 2013, double that by 2016, says Gartner

The speed that mobile advertising has taken off has exceeded Gartner’s expectations, leading the research analysts to revise forecasts. Asia and North America, in particular, are growing faster than predicted, while Western Europe and the rest of the world are not growing as fast as expected.
 

Key findings from Gartner’s research:

 

• Global mobile ad expenditure is forecast to be US$11.4b in 2013, up from $9.8b in 2013, rising to $24.6b in 2016. Asia will continue to be the largest mobile ad market, initially driven by Japan and South Korea, and later by China and India. However the North American market is catching up fast.
• The uptake in smartphones and tablets is driving mobile advertising. But the number of people using mobile media, and hence ad impressions, is growing faster than advertisers can shift their demand from other media, thus creating an over-supply of mobile inventory and driving down cost.
• Growth in mobile advertising is partly at the expense of print advertising.
• Outside Asia, North America and Western Europe, Russia, Brazil and Mexico are tipped as key growth markets for mobile advertising.

 

 

 

 

 

• Mobile search — including paid-positioning on maps and augmented reality — will continue to drive mobile ad spending, but Gartner believes mobile display ad spending will take over from mobile search.
• For the next couple of years expenditure on in-app display ads will be marginally ahead of mobile Web display ads, but mobile Web will dominate from 2015. 

• A significant portion of in-app display ads is taken up by "paid discovery", where app publishers pay for ads to promote their apps and drive more downloads. For many developers the outlay for ads is close to their maximum ad income or even exceeds it. Paid discovery is creating an inflated picture of revenue that may ultimately prove to be a bubble, warns Gartner.

 

By tech360magazine.com