Mary Meeker says the golden age of online and mobile advertising is finally here.
Mary Meeker says the golden age of online and mobile advertising is Meeker said that smartphone shipments will soon exceed those of PCs shipped (both desktops and notebooks), likely in 2012, in what she called an “inflection point” for mobile advertising and e-commerce. Smartphone shipments should also overtake the number of regular (in other words, not Internet-enabled) handsets shipped sometime next year, she said. Meanwhile, use of mobile apps and mobile browsers has doubled in the past year, she noted, adding that the U.S. passed Japan as the country with the most 3G users last year, with more than 123 million to Japan’s 99 million.
The biggest sign of a potential boom in online advertising, according to the Morgan Stanley analyst, is the gap between the time users spend with various forms of media and the amount of money advertisers are devoting them, which she said was still “out of whack.” In particular, time spent with print makes up just 12 percent of users’ media consumption habits, but consumes 26 percent of the ad dollars; Internet usage, meanwhile, accounts for 28 percent of media consumption but just 13 percent of the advertising dollars spent. That, Meeker said, is “a $50 billion opportunity.”