Mobile advertising: $1 billion by 2012

Saturday, January 26, 2008 in personal
Tags: advertising, davos, mobile, prediction, techcrunch

I recently came across this post on TechCrunch. It is a summary of an Expert Panel at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos about the future of mobile technology.

My highlights:

• I found surprising that research by Forrester has predicted a $1 billion (thats 1.000 millions for us in Europe) market for mobile advertising. Isn’t that a really small cake?
• On the other hand, the folks at Google think that their Android will change the situation and that prediction will fall short. That (not trusting Forrester prediction) makes sense… if Google didn’t expect to get a significant amount of money they wouldn’t have started Android in the first place.
• The there is China mobile… wow. 6 million subscribers per month? Amazing… if they only bought something… according to Sony, they only buy blank CDs. I find the thought a bit sad for a company that is planning to make some money from selling mobile content. If they don’t believe in the idea now, I don’t understand how will they fight the competition later.

Making a long story short (and note that this is a summay of a summary 🙂 )… advertising and selling content on the mobile phone is the next big thing or just a secondary line of business. It all depends on who you ask.