The last day of February 2011 could be known as Google Ad Evangelism Day, as key company executives touted the might of the mobile and display ad markets at two separate events.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt continued his mission to tout Google’s mobile cloud computing services at the Interactive Advertising Bureau meeting in Palm Springs, Calif.
Schmidt told the audience that Google sees 200 million mobile playbacks of content on YouTube per day and that mobile search spikes during events such as the Super Bowl.
“It’s happening and it’s happening faster than we predicted,” Schmidt said of the mobile ad explosion. See the 8-minute or so clip here.
He also said: “I see the union of the mobile device and advertising, and particularly display advertising, as the thing that’s really going to revolutionize this,” he said.
That dovetails neatly with what one of his top ad executives, vice president of prodcut management Neal Mohan, said at the Morgan Stanley Tech, Media & Telecom Conference in San Francisco.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Mohan said the online display ad market could top $100 billion over the next several years.
Of course, with YouTube a major ad provider, supported by the DoubleClick Exchange, Google plans to be at the forefront of this market, vying for market share with Facebook, Yahoo and a few lucky other powers.
Indeed, Mohan said Google dedicates1,000 engineers around the world to improve Google’s plot in the Web display ad market, all to get more advertisers to spend more at Google.
Finally, the Journal’s Digits blog previewed an eMarketer report which said Google will boost its already considerable lead in ads paired with Web search in 2011 despite competition from Microsoft and Yahoo. Digits noted:
Specifically EMarketer said Google will increase its share of the $15 billion U.S. search-ad market to more than 75 percent from 71.4 percent last year.
Microsoft’s share will increase to 10.8 percent from 10.2 percent in 2010, while Yahoo’s search-ad share will drop to 8.1 percent from 10.4 percent in 2010.
If you think about it, this all lines up with comScore’s reports that Google is maintaining its search share, Microsoft Bing is growing its search share, all to Yahoo’s detriment. So common sense dictates the search ad shares should mirror this trend. EMarketer shows this is true.
Facebook, eMarketer added, could boost its share of the $10.1 billion U.S. display ad market to 21.6 percent from 13.6 percent in 2010, pushing its ad sales $2.2 billion for the year. Compared to Google’s $25 billion or so in annual ads, that’s a drop in the bucket.
The key takeaways? While Facebook continues to threaten Google’s user engagement and display ad push, the search engine will remain the runaway online search ad provider.
Right now the Web search ad market is good to Google, but one wonders whether the addressable online display ad market will eventually eclipse the Web search market.
In that case, Facebook could make some serious inroads versus Google.