Tech Blog #10: YouTube Mobile Adds Ads

Do you see the Mazda’s ad picture on the left? Yes! It is a video ad on YouTube mobile site. This latest ad offering has attracted three large advertisers’ investments including Mazda, Kia Motors and Sony Pictures.

According to the statistics, YouTube’s mobile app has "tens of millions" of views per day and has grown 160% in 2009. So, how big cake it will be? However, making ads viewable on mobile phones is not as easily as imagined since those video ads should be encoded in a mobile-friendly format while most mobile browsers can't handle Adobe's Flash. So YouTube is still on the way to fix a universal mobile app for different smart mobile phone handsets. I am not a tech guy but I believe this kind of technology problem is just nothing for the smart YouTube guys.

What really get me to have a further thought are two findings.

Firstly, mobile offers advertisers many attractive possibilities. No other device is as personal, interactive and constantly within reach as a cell phone. And cell phones get advertisers more accurate ad targeting due to its parameters such as device type, mobile channel, location or even demographic information. But, how does mobile ad go far? Although mobile provide advertisers different formats including messages, banner and full-page ads on mobile Internet sites etc, advertisers seem still not to prefer it a lot. According to the latest statistics from OUTSELL (see the below picture), mobile ads not only occupy just a small amount (i.e. $1.1B) in the total ad spending but also face the spending decline (i.e. 15.9% down from 2009). So will YouTube’s new app change the situation? Will more advertisers except for those three ones above be involved? Let’s wait and see.

Secondly, from Facebook, Twitter, Skype to Kindle, YouTube, it seems that every popular tech app is rushing into the 3G world and being mobilized. SmarTone, the new iPhone operator in Hong Kong just developed a print ad with the proposition of “140,000 apps to be amazed” (see ad picture as follows). I think this is not just iPhone’s case. Other mobile phone manufacturers are also using a variety of apps offering as a selling point. Just like the ad saying, APPS REALLY MAKES OUR COMMUNICATION LIFE AMAZING!