Report: Surprising Findings About What’s Driving The Mobile Advertising Market

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Report: Surprising Findings About What’s Driving The Mobile Advertising Market

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Millennial Media has always been the silent giant in the room when it comes to mobile advertising. Others, like AdMob, have been quick to grab headlines by releasing monthly reports that highlight eye-catching trends about the iPhone or Wi-Fi. But today, Millennial stepped into the spotlight and published its own report—and sure enough it has some juicy nuggets of its own about the mobile advertising space. (For instance, while the iPhone is the No. 1 phone in March for ad requests, AT&T (NYSE: T) ranks sixth for driving the most traffic. See more on why after the jump…).

Millennial’s CEO Paul Palmieri said they waited to release a report until now because they finally have valuable enough information to share. He said its not about competing with other mobile ad networks, but rather about attracting advertisers to the space from other mediums, such as the internet. He wants advertisers to look at the report and say ‘we can’t achieve what we are trying to achieve without mobile.” Meanwhile, Palmieri gave us his own prediction for how much he expects the mobile advertising industry to grow this year. “It’s still solidly growing. We think the U.S. mobile display market in 2008 was $150 to $160 million, and I think we’ll double that this year.” That compares to Yankee which recently slashed its 2009 worldwide mobile ad display forecast from $1 billion to $200 million. Likewise, eMarketer is predicting 17.3 percent growth this year to reach to $760 million (that’s including all types of advertising, including display and search in the U.S.).

—Millennial Vs. AdMob: Although Palmieri said it’s not about competing, it’s impossible not to line them up next to the leading competitors. In March, Millennial said it received 3.4 billion ad requests, which slightly beats the 2.9 billion ad requests reported by AdMob (however, those are its figures for February).

—Marketshare: In addition to ad requests, Millennial also claims it is reaching more than 50 percent of all mobile web users. Last month, it reached about 31 million mobile web users, which is slightly more than half of all 56.9 million mobile web users, according to Nielsen Mobile.

—Top Carriers: It’s well known that iPhone users over index when it comes to using the mobile web. In fact, like others, Millennial says its the most popular device for web browsing (according to ad requests). However, AT&T ranks sixth when it comes to the top carriers. Here’s the list: Sprint (NYSE: S) Nextel; Wi-Fi; T-Mobile; MetroPCS; Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Wireless; AT&T; Cricket; and Alltel. Palmieri said a lot of smaller carriers are at the top of the list because they’ve pushed unlimited data plans more heavily. MetroPCS has nearly 14 percent of the overall market, and likely is contributing to another one of Milllennial’s findings—that a lot of the traffic is occurring Texas and Florida, where MetroPCS is.

—Top Handsets: While, the iPhone is at the top of the list, when you break it down by handset makers, the rankings are: Samsung; LG; Apple; Motorola; Research In Motion; Sony; Danger and HTC. Perhaps, an interesting one is Danger, the maker of the Sidekick, which has two devices in the top 10. Separately, T-Mobile USA confirmed that the 1 million or so Sidekick users, view more than 450 Web page views every month (much higher than the average of 96 pages, according to Millennial).

—Relevancy and engagement: This one is a bit more difficult to grasp, but Millennial is reporting the relative cost of reaching an engaged user, which is defined as what it costs to get a consumer to do something – like a click, or expand a banner ad. For instance, if you pick a certain demographic, it costs $1.05 to reach an “engaged user.” Your reach goes down, but it’s more targeted, so therefore the price goes up. On the flip-side, you can gain a huge reach, but not being discriminating at all about who you reach—and that can cost as little as 14 cents per engaged user. Palmieri said these are much more affordable prices than the PC.

—Other statistics: 42 percent of the advertisers decided to limit how frequently a particular users sees an advertisement (because likely their engagement goes down if they’ve seen it before); there’s about 1 ad per page on average; about 97 percent of ads are images vs. text; and users on average visit about 96 pages a month. While about 100 page views a month is nothing compared to the PC, it’s about three a day. Palmieri said they aren’t all equal. That person may be visiting the same site over and over. Right now, he said social networks are high on the list.

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