Mobile ads may be a tough market to crack today, but the analysts at Berg Insight believe it will get sorted out — and in a big way. It estimates that in 2017 4.4 percent of the total global ad spend across all media will be targeted at the phone screen.
We’re not just talking about digital advertising — Berg estimates mobile will be 15.5 percent of the total online ad spend. Rather, we’re talking 4.4 percent of all ads, whether they’re shown on TV, staring at you from a billboard or embedded in a website. What’s more, Berg said it was careful how it quantified “mobile.” Ads you view on tablets or other optimized browsing devices don’t count. This would be strictly adverting and marketing that appears on the mobile phone.
In real numbers, Berg estimated that mobile ads and marketing comprised a €3.8 billion (U.S. $ 5 billion) market in 2011, dominated by Google’s AdMob and Apple’s iAd platforms. But Berg is predicting that number will grow by a factor of five into a €19.7 billion market in 2017.
“Consumers are currently devoting a quarter of their media consumption time on mobile devices, yet the channel only attracts slightly more than 1 percent of the ad dollars,” Berg Insight Telecom Analyst Rickard Andersson said in a statement.
Of course, five years is a long ways out, and the track record on such long-term prognostication is mixed. But if Berg is right, that’s only good news to a company like Facebook which has found of its traffic and customers moving to mobile platforms but only recently began advertising on the phone.
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