A new white paper has been released that shows that the market will grow by 27.2 percent this year.
The Korea Internet & Security Agency has now published its 2015 Korea Internet White Paper, in which it has predicted that the mobile advertising market is going to have grown by 27.2 percent, this year, bringing it to a figure that steps over the 1 trillion won mark.
More specifically, it is forecasted that mobile ads will reach about 1.06 trillion won by the close of 2015.
This equates to about US$897.4 million. It will represent the first time the mobile advertising industry has cracked the one trillion won mark. The complete ad market in Korea is estimated to be worth about 9 trillion won, and the current segment of that figure that belongs to mobile marketing is estimated to be around 8.4 percent. Overall, smartphone and tablet marketing has been crawling upward in the size of the total ad market that it represents.
The growth of the mobile advertising market has boosted the proportion of ad to total sales by around 70 percent.
The three main portal business operators in Korea are: Daum, SK Communication and Naver. Those three companies posted a combined sales of 3.7542 trillion won (which equates to about US$3.18 billion). Of that figure, about 71.4 percent, that is 2.6816 trillion won (or approximately US$2.27 billion) was generated by the advertising sector. SK Communications was the portal that generated the greatest percentage of ad sales, with 84.2 percent. In second place was Naver, with 73.1 percent, and then Daum, which had 64.9 percent.
A rise in the usage of mobile communication and a considerable spike in m-commerce in 2014 were believed to be strongly connected with each other. Last year, there was an increase in overall online shopping by 17.5 percent, bringing it to a total of 45.244 trillion won (which was about US$38.24 billion). That represented a massive 125.8 percent rise over the same figure from 2013.
The overall proportion of shopping transactions that took place over mobile commerce from among the total online shopping transactions increased by 15.7 percent over 2013. These trends indicate that mobile advertising will continue its strong and steady growth to keep up with the shopping trend over the same channel.
That said, it is known that Alibaba and Ant Financial have made an investment of $680 million in order to boost their stake in the company from having been 25 percent to become a much larger 40 percent. Back in June, Reuters released a report that indicated that this type of investment could be worth more than $600 million, so the figures do align with what experts had been predicting.