According to prominent Wall Street analyst and leading tech market watcher Gene Munster with Piper Jaffray, Google’s mobile ad revenue may exceed $4 billion in 2012.
Munster says AdSense for mobile and the AdMob unit have been huge cash generators in the past and 2012 will be no different.
Unlike Apple, however, which continues to fall short of initially high expectations surrounding the iAd mobile ad service, Google’s mobile ad business has consistently grown – from $1 billion in 2010 to $2.5 billion in 2011.
Google’s track record of 150 percent mobile ad growth won’t slow in the least this year, says Munster.
“On the advertising side, one source shows that Android is doing well as a percentage of mobile ad impressions on their network, which we believe makes sense since a greater portion of Android apps are free versus paid,” Munster observed.
Thanks in no small part to Google’s Android market share sitting at more than 50 percent, Munster said Android will soon become “biggest platform for mobile advertising both for Google and the industry.”
“Mobile now accounts for 10.1 percent of time spent with media, up from 5.4 percent in 2008, but only 0.9 percent of advertising dollars,” Munster concluded in his note to investors. “The shift to mobile will likely come at the expense of other over-indexed media like newspapers and magazines, but as we know from the shift to online advertising, the shift is likely to be slow and steady.”
