A recent news report issued by eMarketer has suggested that the social network is eating into the search engine giant’s share.
The size of the global mobile marketing share from Facebook, which had been just over $3 billion, last year, is now maintaining a steady climb and is expected to start to cut into the share that had previously been held by Google, said eMarketer in a report that it issued in recent news.
Combined, Google and Facebook make up more than 66 percent of the global mobile ad spend.
That figure is as of 2013, the latest complete year of data. That increased by more than double to reach $17.96 billion, when compared to the same statistic for 2012. At the same time, eMarketer’s mobile marketing report was quick to point out that “Google still owns a plurality of the mobile advertising market worldwide, taking a portion of nearly 50 per cent in 2013, but the rapid growth of Facebook will cause the search giant’s share to drop to 46.8 per cent in 2014, eMarketer estimates.”
Mobile marketing revenue at Facebook was worth 53 percent of Facebook’s overall ad revenue in Q4 2013.
This was a massive rise when compared to the year before. In fact, the portion of the mobile ad revenue rose by 23 percent from where it had been in the same quarter in 2012. Revenue from advertising, overall, had been 2.34 billion in the last quarter of last year.
The report pointed out that the size of the market share at Facebook in particular is getting larger. In 2012, it represented only 5.4 percent of the worldwide ad market. Last year, that had risen tremendously, to bring it to 17.5 percent of the global advertising market. The prediction that the report made for this year was that it will reach 21.7 percent by the time that it comes to a close.
The speed with which smartphone based advertising has taken over the ad revenue for the social network is indicative of its future. In 2012, only 11 percent of the net global ad revenues at Facebook were over the mobile marketing channel. Last year, that ballooned to 45.1 percent.
The social network is working on appealing to this market through a promise of successful advertising.
In an effort to become more appealing to app development firms, Facebook has been testing an entirely new form of mobile ads service since at least the end of January, which provides advertisements directly to a certain handful of smartphone and tablet applications.
Now, that social network is starting to indicate that an official launch of the service may occur in April.
The suggestion has been made that the mobile ads service could be launched at the F8 developer conference, next month. This would make an offering to all app makers for an entirely new revenue source that had not previously been available through the social media giant. Until now, the platform simply wasn’t in a position to truly assist developers in being able to monetize their apps.
Facebook has now taken its time to develop a mobile ads service that it believes will promise success.
According to Ilya Sukhar, who is responsible for the oversight of developer efforts at Facebook, “That had to be figured out.” He went on to say that “There just generally was a period of time when the company, as has been widely reported, has been figuring stuff out [on mobile]. This is a signal that we think we’ve figured it out.”
He explained that assisting developers in being able to monetize their applications will be a central focus of the announcements that will be made next month at the conference. In the past, the F8s in the past were primarily focused on rolling out features on Facebook that were more consumer facing. This will be different, this year, as developers will be nearly the only focus of the event, according to Sukhar, who also added that it will “help folks build, grow, and monetize their apps.”
Monetizing is one of the largest struggles faced by mobile app development companies. As Facebook has considerable strength in monetizing attention, they are hoping to be able to combine those two environments through their mobile ads service, for mutual benefit between themselves and developers.
