Here’s something for all you mobile startups out there possibly relying on advertising as a revenue source. Apparently the global recession is having “little to no effect” on mobile advertisers or user habits, according to BuzzCity. Granted the Singapore-based provider of wireless communities probably has an axe to grind but it does at least have a mobile ad network to base this claim on. Its quarterly Global Mobile Advertising Index for its network covers 200 countries globally.
It shows that in the first three months of 2009, the network delivered 8.5 billion paid advertising banners, an increase of 11% over the previous quarter. The following table shows the top 10 countries by the number of paid advertising banners delivered in each:
1. Indonesia: 4.4 billion (23% growth)
2. India: 842 million (16%)
3. United States: 527 million (38%)
4. South Africa: 428 million (-8 %)
5. Egypt: 162 million (8 % )
6. Romania: 161 million (9 %)
7. China: 130 million ( 67% )
8. Philippines: 125 million (8 %)
9. United Kingdom: 113 million (54 %)
10. Bangladesh: 112 million (-16 %)
As you can see growth was pretty big in China, the United Kingdom and the United States. The UK is in this Top 10 for the first time and joins Romania. Who knows what happened in Bangladesh.
Frankly you can read a lot into these figures – certainly the explosion in mobile services in emerging markets is one – but my take-away from this is that the Mobile Web is just growing bigger and bigger by the hour.