Google has its enormous eye on just about every arena of life out there, and the mobile arena is definitely no exception. With about 3 billion mobile handsets in the world, according to Dilip Venkatachari, director of product management responsible for mobile monetization efforts at Google, it’s clear that there could be huge potential for any major advertising push.
The search giant has begun sending out a limited number of beta invitations to mobile Web site developers to display Google advertisements on their mobile sites.
Sites qualified for the beta test must be written in either WML (Wireless Markup Language), XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language) or CHTML (Compact HTML) so that Google’s crawlers can read the content on the page to deliver relevant ads.
According to October 2006 numbers released by Informa Telecoms & Media, worldwide mobile search advertising revenues in 2006 were only $3 million. This figure is expected to explode to $1.5 billion by 2011. Piper Jaffray is even more bold with its expectations, predicting $11 billion by 2008.
eMarketer expects to see 405.5 million mobile Web users in 2007, and 982.4 million by 2011. Of this figure, 844.9 million of these users in 2011 are expected to also be mobile search users.
Clearly, the virtually untapped mobile realm offers some tempting opportunities for whoever can grab hold of an early lead.
Sources:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20070714/tc_pcworld/134571;_
ylt=AtUfv_H2znS2KvGFJrwvQz76VbIF
http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1005083
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=
71600&ctx=sibling
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