A new report published today by Flurry details the massive growth in in-app mobile advertising inventory, showing that it’s set to absorb the entire U.S. Online display ad spend by the end of the year.
Flurry estimates that, worldwide, over 600 thousand apps are available for over 350 million iOS and Android devices. On average, consumers have downloaded over 65 apps per device. For its report, Flurry focused on the size and growth of available advertising inventory within iOS and Android applications, using data from over 100,000 applications tracked by the company’s analytics platform.
Flurry tracked the number of ads shown per mobile app use-session and found the average to be roughly 4.3 ads per session, with the average session lasting 4.2 minutes. For comparison, the average session length of a website is just under 1 minute.
In comparing this inventory with the net spend on display advertising in the US, it was found that the market currently spends a little over $12B per year on Online display advertising. This translates to a conservative CPM of roughly $2.50 for mobile application inventory. As a point of reference, a typical 30 second video on a large video streaming website such as Hulu has a CPM of $10-$15.
The bottom line is that in-app mobile advertising continues to grow at a staggering rate. Flurry gives four reasons for the massive uptick:
- Smartphone growth – over a million smartphone devices are currently being activated on a daily basis
- Publisher growth – The App store now has over 400,000 apps in the market and Android, with over 200,000, is catching up quickly
- Session use growth – Flurry has previously found that smartphone users now spend more time in mobile apps per day than the average Internet users spends online.
- Publisher integration of ads – with larger screens, targeting, and increased adoption of mobile applications, more publishers are integrating ads into their apps
