Recent figures from research firm IDC show that the US market for mobile advertising is growing at a rapid rate, doubling over the past year.

Even more interesting is the conclusion that Google currently represents almost 60% of this market revenue!

According to the IDC report, as quoted in Bloomberg Businessweek, the US market for mobile display and search advertising in 2009 was approximately $368 million. This year, it is expected to more than double to $877 million. This is a result of more and more brands devoting a larger share of their media budget to the channel.

“Advertisers have embraced this in a big way,” says Karsten Weide, a vice-president at IDC. “They think it’s a great marketing tool; they are flocking to it. The infrastructure and the audience are finally there to make this worthwhile.”

Google!

The big winner in this market seems to be Google, whose market share has jumped from 49% last year to 59% this year. In fact, in their Q3 2010 financial report, Google announced that they expect to generate $1 billion this from mobile. (see MobiAd article).

A large part of this growth comes from Google’s acquisition of of mobile network AdMob, which had 8% market share last year.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt famously stated “We can make more money in mobile than we do in the desktop eventually…” and the company seems to be moving to make that promise a reality.

The others

IDC also predicted market share numbers for the other four key players in the US mobile ad market:

Apple, which was not in the mobile ad business in 2009 will end up 2010 with just over 8% market share. A large part of this is their purchase of Quattro which was 5% in 2009, combined with Apple’s own growth.

Millennial Media will be third in the market, with a share of 6.8 percent, growing from 5.4 percent in 2009.

Yahoo will drop to fourth place with 5.6%, down from 7% in 2009.

Finally, Microsoft is predicted to end the year with 4.3 percent, down from 6.3 percent in the previous year.

The future?

Although it is of course very hard to tell exactly what path the market will follow over the coming year, a couple of things seem fairly clear.

• The overall market should continue to grow quickly. In fact, IDC believes the market could well double again next year, reaching close to $2 billion in 2011.
• Apple has just launched iAds for the iPad, and the overall iAD market is really just beginning. Given the growth of the iOS platform there is good reason to believe Apple will continue to gain marketshare, although long term it will be limited.
• Regarding Yahoo and Microsoft, there doesn’t seem to be anything on the horizon that will cause a great uptake for their networks.
• With Google continuing to innovate and dedicate resources to mobile, their share seems likely to keep rising. Also, the Android platform is now really beginning to take off, and though this doesn’t directly impact Google’s mobile ad sales at the present, they may well have some future features or services planned that will leverage this growing installed base of Android phones.