Six Mobile Adviews?

Following on last weeks piece on divergent mobile advertising market estimates, comes a new, high estimate of $12.8 billion for global mobile ad spending in 2013.

The mobile advertising market has evolved rapidly from the bad-old-days of WAP ads, a standard devised with the false expectation that mobile ads would forever be smaller, different and separate from the "real" internet ads seen on desktop browsers. This evolution appears to have left different research firms to include or exclude different swathes of revenue that could be argued are part of the mobile advertising ecosystem. The biggest question on these figures is whether the methodology includes just mobile-specific ads or additionally ads placed on websites but that happen to appear on mobile devices (apparently almost half of online ads nowadays). Revenue included in some but not all estimates include tech and targeting services, and in one case even in-app purchases.

To put that in context, respected global adspend forecasts would place that figure at more money than is seen in, say, radio or magazine advertising.

In contrast, Juniper Research predicted $2.4 billion flowing in 2012 for in-app advertising, although they appear to lump in-app purchases along with advertising. Strategy Analytics predicted $1.2 billion. That firm also benchmarked 2011 spending as $500 million.

BIA/Kelsey puts the figure at $3.9 billion.

Interestingly, especially for those firms including all ads that happen to appear on people's mobile devices, these ads are thought not to be as effective as those seen on desktop computers. This distinction might serve as a rational reason for separating out and tagging those impressions as "mobile" impressions, but not for the reasons that mobile ad boosters might like.