According to new data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau, mobile accounted for the single largest individual segment of the $59.6 billion spent annually on online advertising.
All in, mobile accounted for 35 percent – at $20.68 billion – an impressive number in its own right, and a two-thirds increase from a year ago.
“Mobile’s impressive upswing is a testament to its increasing importance to marketers,” said Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of IAB.
The report further noted ubiquity of access to consumers as a chief selling point of mobile advertising.
“Internet advertising was a disruptive innovation when the industry was formed,” says David Silverman, partner, PwC US. “Twenty years later we still see double-digit growth rates, including 20% in 2015. Three key disruptive trends — mobile, social, and programmatic — continue to fuel this exceptional rate of growth.”
Other areas of growth the report highlighted were in social media advertising, which was up 55.7 percent to $ 10.9 billion in revenue. The IAB defines social media as any advertisement delivered on a social media or gaming site or app, on any type of device, mobile or desktop.
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Non-mobile search advertising also saw growth, though not in the sorts of insane figures the other categories were sporting – up 8 percent to 20.48 billion. Still that is enough to make non-mobile search the second biggest category in online revenue, representing 34 percent of total revenue.
“Retail advertisers continue to represent the largest category of Internet ad spending, responsible for 22% percent last year, followed by automotive and financial services which each accounted for 13% of the year’s revenues,” the report states.
Google, the leading Internet search provider, and Facebook, the biggest social network operator, together claimed a whopping 64 percent of the $59.6 billion in online advertising revenue, according to Pivotal Research analyst Brian Wieser.
Of that, Google grabbed the lionshare of $30 billion, leaving $8 billion behind for Facebook. Those big firm’s gains seem to have been smaller firms’ losses – as smaller companies actually lost marketshare over the last year.
“Smaller companies will continue to operate in the shadows of the industry’s two dominant players,” Wieser wrote in a note to investors.
