Mobile Advertising - It's very early days

In today's Mobile Marketing track at World Telemedia in Budapest, the first session was titled: "Making Money in a Free Content World: getting clever with ad-funding and beyond." This is an area just getting off the ground.  Purely anecdotal but interesting, was a video program that flipped from paid downloads to ad-funding, i.e. free to the consumer.  In the 12 months prior to flipping, they had 5000 downloads.  In the 12 months after, they had 24 million downloads.

But slow speeds and limited browser context (as mentioned in my last post), severely limit the ability to have click through ads. Most of the mobile ads discussed this morning were banners using publisher pricing like a magazine, i.e. cost per thousand (CPM) views, rather than the advertiser-friendly Internet approach of cost per click (CPC). This is very lame and unlikely to foster the phenomenal growth rates we've seen for Internet advertising.

While I don't have EU figures at hand, I thought these figures from a recent Morgan Stanley report on US Internet advertising were revealing,

	Unique Users (000s)	Total Pages Viewed (MM)	Total Minutes (MM)	US Ad Rev/ User (2Q06 annualized)
Total Internet	173,428	462,186	310,466	$31.44
Google	107,365	10,264	5,232	$12.28
Yahoo!	129,724	39,878	42,715	$8.65
Microsoft	119,376	18,721	22,125	$3.25
Time Warner	120,276	18,000	36,106	$1.62
MySpace	55,849	34,988	11,503	$1.32
eBay	78,991	10,972	6,480	$0.33
YouTube	20,759	1,386	1,047	<$1.00

especially when compared to US mobile ad revenues (mostly SMS marketing) of well under $1 per user.

Chetan Sharma has a good overview of mobile advertising status and prospects, here.

Comments

[LiveAdvertiser.com]

Places like www.Alertlet.com provide enhanced text messaging and sms advertising solutions that will re-invigorate "digital marketing".

[Ashu Mathura]

Also lot's of statistics on mobile advertising here: www.madvertisingblog.com