Mobile Monetization – Are We There Yet?

by Amy Vale

Mobile advertising campaigns don’t hold value for publishers, developers and app stores unless they are tied to monetization. Monetization is why our customers value and use Mocean Mobile to serve up and deliver millions, if not billions, of ad impressions each month. It’s what translates to increased revenue and bottom-line growth.

It was also the subject of a comprehensive 100+-slide presentation last week on 2012 Internet & Mobile Trends at D10 by Mary Meeker, a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers. There are 1.1 billion mobile 3G subscribers worldwide, which marks a 37% growth year over year but is only 18% penetration. That’s compared to 2.3 billion global Internet users, with growth of just 8 percent from last year.

The former Wall Street analyst revealed that mobile e-commerce represented 8 percent of the total e-commerce market in the U.S. Plus, payments for and within applications today account for 71 percent of revenue versus 29 percent for mobile advertising. Above all, she pointed to an obvious and clear gap between time spent on mobile (10%) versus mobile ad spend (1%) in the U.S. So what does all of this mean for mobile monetization? In what some might call a “light at the end of the tunnel,” there’s a genuine opportunity for content publishing companies to see their average revenue per mobile user surpass those on the desktop over the next three to five years. Whether it’s by serving ads based on “where” users are located, “what” they are searching for, or “when” they are searching, the future of mobile monetization is looking bright.