If you aren’t already thinking of mobile media as competition for your local radio business, note this item.
By one count, mobile local search ad revenues in the United States will reach $1.3 billion in five years, growing 130% a year.
The Kelsey Group also says the combined total of search and display revenues in the mobile market will total $3.1 billion by then, growing at a compound annual rate of more than 80%.
Kelsey Group, part of BIA, said it is expanding its own attention to this niche, and it launched a new advisory service called Mobile Local Media.
The research company’s Michael Boland said as mobile data consumption grows, “we expect local marketing to be a big winner. There is a strong correlation between local search and the mobile use case, which will cause a good portion of the ongoing mobile application boom to focus on local.”
It also found that the percentage of mobile searches that have “local intent” will increase from 28% in 2008 to 35% in 2013; that about 15% of iPhone applications are local; and that there are 54.5 million mobile Internet users in the United States, representing 25 percent of online users.
