According to latest figures from Gartner, mobile ad revenues will grow from $9.6 billion in 2012 to $11.4 billion this year. Furthermore, the figure is set to reach $24.5 billion in 2016, with these revenues creating new opportunities for app developers, ad networks, mobile platform providers, specialty agencies and even communications service providers in certain regions.
The company’s research director Stephanie Baghdassarian said that the mobile market took off faster than expected due to an increased uptake in smartphones and tablets, as well as the merger of consumer behaviors on computers and mobile devices. She went on to add that the growth in mobile advertising comes in part at the expense of print formats, especially local newspapers.
The fast-changing market will also see different geographical regions evolving at a different pace and in different directions. Historically, users Japan and South Korea consumed more digital content than people living in other parts of the world. However, the high-growth economies of China and India are expected to contribute increasingly to mobile advertising growth, as their expanding middle classes present attractive markets for global and local brands.
North America and Western Europe are expected to close the gap on Asia/Pacific as the mobile channel gets more and more integrated with 360-degree advertising campaigns. Consumer multitasking will drive preference for multiplatform approaches, blurring the lines between channels and making it difficult to eliminate category overlap. In the rest of the world — Latin America, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East and Africa — mobile advertising growth will be aligned with technology adoption and the stabilization of emerging economies, but will mostly be driven by large markets such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico.
It’s also worth looking at how different types of mobile advertising will evolve. Mobile search — including paid positioning on maps and various forms of augmented reality, all of which can be informed by location — will contribute to drive mobile ad spending across the forecast period, although it will diminish in strength as the period progresses. However, Gartner believes that mobile display ad spending will grow and take over from mobile search with Web display spending over-taking in-app display from 2015… As usual, you can get more information from Gartner’s website.