The Next Frontier

Considering all the buzz about mobile marketing and texting lately, I thought it was worthy of a rehash.

From Reuters. Mobile Phone Users Double Since 2000.

The next space advertising hasn't touched....Yet.

GENEVA (Reuters) - Mobile phone subscribers around the globe totaled nearly 1.5 billion by the middle of this year, about one quarter of the world's population, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) said on Thursday.

1.5 Billion eyes (well 3B really) advertisers now need to capture. 1.5 billion TV's to advertise on, 1.5 billions PC's.

The figure reflected a sharp surge in the mobile telephony business, especially in developing countries, over the first half of the decade, with subscribers doubling since 2000, according to the United Nations agency's annual report

The ITU said the growth in mobile phone subscribers had outpaced that for fixed lines, who totaled some 1.185 billion today against 1 billion at the start of the century, and was also outstripping the rate of increase in Internet users.

The growth in mobile phones is now faster than Internet users. So the lil 2x2 screen traffic is winning.

And by the middle of the year developing countries as a whole had overtaken rich nations to account for 56 percent of all mobile subscribers, while accounting for 79 percent of growth in the market since 2000.

The value of global mobile business reached $414 billion in revenues in 2003, a tenfold increase in the decade since 1993, while over the same period the overall telecommunications sector grew by an average of 8.8 per cent to reach $1.1 trillion.

By the end of this year, the report said, global revenues from mobile networks were likely to exceed those from fixed-line networks for the first time.

I guess you really can't call them Baby Bells anymore, more like the Broken Down Bells.

The ITU said the number of Internet users -- around 400 million in the year 2000 -- had grown to nearly 700 million by the middle of this year, slowing down after the rapid surge in the second half of the 1990s.

U.S.Online Ad spending is expected to reach $10 billion this yr.


How big will it be when advertisers realize the shift.

Google and search engines are the concept advertisers are placing their bets on for the Internet, but what/who will be the platform for advertising in the mobile space?