Infinite Path

Unless you’ve been living in a cave for the past few years, you won’t have failed to notice the remarkable boom in the popularity of smartphones, both in the UK and abroad. Models such as the iPhone, the Blackberry, and the Palm have opened up a whole world of mobile advertising possibilities. The precise potential of this new market is difficult to pin down but the Kelsey Group has made an admirable effort to uncover some statistics in its latest piece of market research.

The firm has estimated that the market will boom from $160 million last year to over $3 billion in 2013. This growth rate represents a remarkable projection and, even if it fails to grow to quite that extreme extent, the scope for mobile advertising during the coming years is undoubtedly going to be huge.

The really interesting thing about this latest piece of research, however, is the projected rate of growth of mobile search, expected to increase from last year’s figure of 24% of the total mobile ad market to 73% in 2013 (bear in mind the significance of this percentage jump given the estimated growth of the market as a whole).

The figures have emerged at a time during which Google is making a concerted effort to place more ads on Apple’s iPhone, along with other smartphones that run the Android operating system. The launch of the new AdSense for High End Mobile service will enable mobile publishers to serve text and image ads on sites, which will, according to the company, help these individuals turn a healthy profit. This move is thought to be Google’s response to the research recently released stating that smart phone sales are likely to rise 27% this year to almost 180 million units.