eMarketer: The potential of advertising revenue in the mobile content industry

In today's mobile terminal landscape, marketers are no strangers to this logic: more advanced terminals in hand and more content consumption mean more marketing information touchpoints.

Just as it sounds, mobile advertising is growing in size along with the audience and their activities. eMarketer expects that mobile music, games and video revenue from advertising models will grow 52.7% to 433.8 million yuan in 2012, after rocketing 81.9% in 2011.

By 2015, eMarketer predicts that U.S. mobile content advertising revenue will exceed $1 billion, with growth rates slowing but still above double digits.

The shift in advertising dollars to mobile content is partly due to consumer demand for premium mobile content, but also because existing mobile content revenue models are leaning toward advertising.

Of the revenues from mobile music, video and games, eMarketer predicts that 30% will come from advertising by 2015, up from 20% in 2011. The rest will be paid revenues, including subscriptions and download fees.

The share of mobile content from paid channels is stagnating and falling, but paid revenue will still grow from $1.16 billion in 2011 to $2.52 billion in 2015. Between 2010 and 2015, mobile paid content revenue will grow at an average annual rate of 27.8%, while advertising will grow at a rate of 47.1%. Overall, mobile music, games and video content will generate 35.9% of the revenue in 2015.