One year on, in-app advertising going strong

Californian gadget shop Apple will celebrate the first anniversary of the opening of its App Store on Saturday, July 11, and the party’s still going strong.

Mobile advertising platform AdMob, which claims to deliver adverts to around 40 per cent of the world’s iPhones said that 31.4 per cent of its almost eight billion ad requests worldwide over the past year came from Apple handsets [including the iTouch] and 18.6 per cent of those came from the iPhone.

With regards to AdMob’s user base, 28.4 per cent of all 282 million ad requests in the UK came from iPhones, while in the US, iPhones accounted for 25.7 per cent of 3.8 billion ad requests.

Thomas Schulz, AdMob’s managing director for EMEA, recently told telecoms.com that in-app advertising is where all the action is taking place at present. “A lot of the ads we’re doing on the iPhone are running in applications because, in the iPhone world at least, apps have a big chunk of the traffic,” he says. “You have more visually appealing models like trailers, revolving canvasses. You occupy the page and you can link to a click to call or a map, whatever you want. What we’ve seen in terms of click through on these ads on the iPhone is a multiple of what we’re used to because the ads are more appealing.”

Revenues are also higher than the norm, Schulz says. “There’s a very wide range but, in general, it’s definitely making more money. It generates more money for the publisher, that’s for sure.”

And despite heavy competition in the application arena, the numbers are still good. Around five per cent of iPhone apps in AdMob’s network had more than 100,000 active users in May 2009, 14 per cent had between 10,000 – 100,000 active users, and 27 per cent had between 1,000 – 10,000 active users.

Google, which is making its presence felt everywhere currently, is taking on the likes of AdMob with its own strategy for in-app advertising. Last month the web giant opened up the beta version of its AdSense platform for mobile applications.

AdSense for Mobile Applications allows developers to earn revenue by displaying text and image ads inside iPhone and Android applications.