14 DAY TRIAL // The web is definitely going mobile especially with the growing popularity of smartphone devices and Apple’s latest runaway hit, the iPad. In fact, analysts say that mobile searches may account for 10 percent of Google’s total search volume in the US. That would mean that mobile users did about one billion searches in June, based on the latest comScore numbers.
Citi financial analyst Mark Mahaney released a research note based on the new search market numbers and commented that mobile search results are “likely growing very rapidly for GOOG - perhaps triple-digit Y/Y growth” and that they now account for almost 10 percent of the queries Google sees in a month. Note that comScore doesn’t provide numbers for mobile searches, the analyst is just estimating how big the market is.
Based on the search volume numbers for June, which show that users conducted 10.292 billion searches on all Google sites, YouTube included, mobile searches would add up to close to 1.03 billion. And that number is expected to rise quickly as more and more people get accustomed to accessing the web on the go.
For Google, this is important because it is very focused on the mobile advertising market which it expects to be a major driver of revenue in the coming years. Already, using some very rough estimates, Google’s revenue from mobile ads should be getting close to the $1 billion per year mark and should be in the hundreds of millions of dollars this year.
The mobile space is expected to be one of the areas where Google and other online advertising companies will see the biggest growth in the next few years. The market is still in its infancy and a lot more volatile than the larger online ad market. And it’s definitely alluring, Apple, a hardware manufacturer by definition, has just entered the space with iAds. [via ReadWriteWeb]