14 DAY TRIAL // Google has been very bullish on mobile search and mobile advertising. It's been pursuing the emerging market greatly and is even giving out Android for free just to get its apps and search engine on as many devices as possible. It seems to be paying off though, not only does Google dominate the mobile search market but also the ad market.
Google's share of the mobile search market is at 98 percent in the US, virtual dominance. Since it's the default search engine on both the iPhone and Android devices, most of them anyway, that's hardly surprising.
So the fact that it also dominates the ad market, with about 97 percent the ad revenue on mobile devices in the US going to Google, according to a report form Efficient Frontier.
The figure speaks for itself, Bing and Yahoo combined only account for 3.2 percent of the mobile paid search revenue in the US. But the numbers refer to clients using both Google and Bing or Yahoo.
Even among those willing to experiment, the amount of money they spend on anything else than Google is paltry. And there are those that stick to Google alone of course.
What's more, the mobile ad market is growing fast in the US. Right now, mobile ads account for about 4.3 percent of overall online search marketing spending. That's already a significant sum, considering how young the market is, but the figure is about to grow much larger.
The more optimistic figures show that mobile search ad spending could reach close to 10 percent by the end of the year. Even the more conservative numbers have the share reach seven percent in December 2011.
Google has been overtly optimistic about the mobile market. But even it's estimates have been pessimistic, it seems, the growth figures exceeded Google's expectations lately. In no time at all, mobile search ads are going to make a tidy sum for Google, over one billion dollars per year.