Mobile advertising statistics continue to confuse as reports from market research firms forecast boom times ahead, while actual activity seems increasingly uneven.
The latest insight from the ad network BuzzCity indicates that mature mobile markets--the UK in this case--had registered a drop in ad interest, while the top five markets--which included Indonesia, India, South Africa and Vietnam, grew rapidly.
The company said that the total number of ads served on its network totalled 12.8 billion in the second quarter, but the number of ads served to UK mobile users was 191 million during the period compared to 229 million the previous quarter. However, during the same quarter, BuzzCity said there was a 61 per cent increase in global ads served.
The top 20 countries in Buzz City's league table delivered around 82 per cent of this traffic, while the UK slipped to the eighth most popular market below Canada and Kenya.
Of note was India with a 98 per cent surge in traffic, but it remained in second place, with audiences receiving just under half (2.1 billion) of banners than Indonesia. The number of markets reporting over ten million page impressions went from 32 to 44, which BuzzCity believes could increase further with the expected uptake of cheap smartphones in developing economies.
Meanwhile, ABI Research believes that the amount of dollars spent on mobile device advertising will quadruple in five years, reaching more than US$1.2 billion by 2015.
According to ABI's practice director Neil Strother, marketers have increasingly been shifting budgets into mobile campaigns. "This became evident during our research interviews with advertising agency executives, technology vendors and mobile ad network operators, who said they have been seeing year-over-year increases of 25 per cent to 30 per cent in campaign spending," he added.
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