Global mobile advertising market grows to $5.46 billion: Report

Start-ups are being encouraged to prioritise mobile digital advertising to take advantage of mobile’s “hyper-personal” nature, after figures highlighted its growth as an advertising medium.

A survey by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, with its IAB Europe affiliate and research firm IHS, found $5.46 billion was spent on mobile digital advertising in 2011.

According to the survey, the Asia-Pacific region accounted for 35.9% of global revenues, followed by North America at 31.4% and Europe at 25.9%.

More than half of the revenues ($3.4 billion) were search-related, while $1.54 billion came from display ads and $551.87 million came from messaging.

“As mobile accelerates its global footprint, it is vital that we measure the worldwide and regional opportunities for advertisers,” IAB’s Anna Bager told AAP.

Alain Heureux, president and chief executive of IAB Europe, described mobile as “hyper-personal and always on”, which means it has “tremendous potential” as an advertising medium.

Twitter certainly thinks so – chief executive Dick Costolo has revealed the site generates more advertising revenue from its mobile platform than from its website.

Jan Dawson, chief telecoms analyst at tech analyst firm Ovum, says Twitter has a long heritage in mobile, so Costolo’s claim makes sense.

“Its management clearly wants people to understand that it doesn’t see the same challenges in monetising mobile as Facebook does,” Dawson says.

“It’s as if he’s saying, ‘We’re not Facebook – don’t tar us with the same brush. We’re doing just fine in mobile, thank you very much!’”

But according to Dawson, that’s not to say Twitter doesn’t have its own challenges with regard to mobile.

“In contrast to Facebook, which hasn’t found a way to monetise the use of its own clients on mobile devices, Twitter’s biggest challenge will be finding a way to monetise the use of third-party clients on mobile devices, which were the only option in the early days and are still very popular,” Dawson says.

“Twitter has tried to overcome that problem by acquiring several of the most popular clients, but it still doesn’t have a definitive strategy for monetising mobile either.”