Driven by Facebook and Google, Mobile Ad Market Soars 105% in 2013
Mobile ad spending on pace to reach $31.45 billion this year — Last year, global mobile ad spending increased 105.0% to total $17.96 billion, according to new figures from eMarketer. In 2014, mobile is on pace …
Context & Ripple Effects
The 105% jump to $17.96 billion caps an arc eMarketer has been tracking all year: Facebook's big gains in global mobile ad market share through mid-2013, followed by December's finding that mobile growth had pushed Facebook into second place among US digital ad sellers. The pickup across eight outlets — Business Insider, TechCrunch, CNET, Mashable and others — signals how central the duopoly question has become.
The scale also retroactively validates the 2012 paidContent forecast that mobile content and ad sales would hit $67B, with advertising now clearly the faster-moving half of that market. With 2014 spending projected at $31.45B, the story is less that mobile is growing than who is absorbing the growth.
First-order effects
- Facebook and Google are the named beneficiaries: the two companies drive the doubling of global mobile ad spending, with Facebook's mobile momentum having already lifted it to the No. 2 spot in US digital advertising by December 2013.
- eMarketer's $31.45B projection for 2014 gives advertisers and agencies a planning baseline — mobile budgets set for the year will be built against a market expected to nearly double again.
Second-order effects
- Publishers and ad networks outside the Facebook-Google pair must compete for a mobile budget pool increasingly concentrated in two platforms, pressuring them to build native and app-based ad products rather than port desktop display formats.
- Agencies and measurement vendors face demand to treat mobile as a primary channel rather than a test line item, since a market at this growth rate reprices inventory and audience data quickly.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, mobile shifts from being a subset of digital advertising to the sector's growth engine, concentrating pricing power and audience data with the platforms that own mobile identity and apps — a structure regulators and advertisers would both eventually have to engage with.
- At sustained triple-digit growth, mobile's share of total ad spending rises fast enough that legacy channels' relative position becomes the open question, even though the corpus does not yet quantify when any crossover happens.
The trend: Mobile advertising is compounding at rates that concentrate global ad budgets around a Facebook-Google duopoly, making platform share rather than channel growth the competitive battleground.