Mobile Advertising, who will take the new market shares ?
Mobile Advertising is probably the next coming in advertising business, since mobile is becoming more and more common these days and many users browse from their mobile to read news, check email, ...etc. Many big actors in internet services such Google, Yahoo and Microsoft have already make their entry into mobile business and started providing their services for mobile. This is the first step to launch advertising for mobile, which is to create the services. The mobile market have considerably been expanded in the last years, and in the future it's expected that there will be much more internet users from mobile worldwide.
Google mobile have started by providing Google search engine for mobile for the web, images and still in beta for mobile websites. Recently there were two additions which are the Google news for mobile, GMail for mobile and the personalized mobile home page; a collection of services that rhyme very well with Google's philosophy for providing web services. There will be certainly in the future a migration of more services into mobile. Currently Google didn't reveal any intention to advertise on mobile, but it's certainly in their business plans.
Yahoo has chosen to be the mobile portal, and take a lead position of portal website for mobile as it's being a lead portal for the web. The current Yahoo! mobile portal is very complete including email, messenger, photos, search, games, news, sports, finance, weather, movies, driving directions, address book, calendar. The competition is certainly very big with its rivals but I think that Yahoo! is making the right decision forward being the lead mobile portal. Notice that Yahoo! have the advantage with a higher number of users on email and messenger compared to Google which is very new in this business.
Microsoft is also present on the mobile market with MSN for mobile, but seriously I don't find it a real competitor for the previous services. The only advantages is the possibility to read your hotmail from your mobile phone, otherwise even the applications itself aren't very well optimized for mobile, a very insufficient mobile experience with user interface. Currently available in MSN mobile Windows live mail beta, Windows live search beta, MSN hotmail, MSN messenger, MSN spaces beta, MSN calendar, MSN Money, Ringtones, Games and entertainment, SuperPages, local, news, ESPN sports.
Notice that all are focusing on the "mobile portal approach" in different ways. Google as usual trying to get the maximum from search service, but in the same time providing alternative services such email, news ... Yahoo have the advantage of holding the higher number of email users, and a very high number of messenger users, in addition of being the number 1 portal in the web. Microsoft are leading only with the highest number of messenger users, but in the same time their messenger client for mobile is very slow and lack to many simple functionalities which make it very difficult to use.
So talking about mobile advertising what will be the next generation of advertising support : search, email, news, messengers or other ?
