Mobile ad firm AdMob has delivered one billion advertising impressions to mobile handsets during the past 6 months and reckons that this gives it more idea than most how mobile handset advertising will develop.
Admob said that while it had expected US users to make up only a small portion of the mobile web, in fact the US generate by far the most mobile web traffic and therefore most advertising impressions. Surprisingly, South Africa was the second largest source of mobile web users across AdMob’s publisher base.
In all, the top five countries in terms of traffic are the US with 20% of traffic (ninety million pageviews/month), South Africa with 15%, India with 13% the UK with 12% and finally Romania with 5%.
AdMob has categorized its customers into five primary channel types communities, downloads, portals, news and information, and entertainment. And the traffic breakdown by channel is Communities 45%; Downloads 44%; Portals 8%; Entertainment 2%; News and Information 1%
The devices which were used to access the adverts on the mobile web were Nokia representing 41% of the devices, followed by Motorola with 14%;
Sony-Ericsson with 13%, Samsung with 12% and LG with just 3%.
AdMob pointed to a research report from eMarketer which predicted that spend will reach $5 billion on mobile advertising by 2011, up from $421 million today.
‘The encouraging data point for the mobile web is not just the number of ads being served, but the pace at which things are growing,’ explained Omar Hamoui, Founder and CEO of AdMob. ‘In our first six months, we only served about thirty million ads, and over the next six months we served one-billion more.’