Check out the following article on MobileMarketing.com that talks about a recent Admob study of the growth in smartphone users based on the volume of ads served by admob to smartphones over the last two years. The amazing growth is highlighted by the fact that only two years ago, there weren’t any google android phones or Apple iPad and the iphone touch was a little over 1% of worldwide requests from a mobile search, as documented in the study. We all expect smartphone growth to continue growing substantially. However, mobile ads served via mobile apps is just a small piece of the picture. The real volumes and impressions are driven via basic SMS, and the volumes of texting is growing across all demographics. Obviously, ads in text messages are highly contested for reasons of privacy and intrusion (only 140 characters total and not a lot of room for ad-copy). Growth in mobile usage is great, but until it truly hits scale to deliver significant ad-impressions for advertisers, it will be a testing-bed for advertisers with insignificant budgets.
