Facebook Autoplay Video Ads Help Mobile Advertising Audience Double in First Quarter 2014

Monday, February 24, 2014

Mobile advertising continues to heat up and to help understand the mobile ad market, Citrix has released its Citrix Mobile Analytics Report for the first quarter of 2014. The report provides insight into subscriber behavior and related factors that determine quality of experience for mobile data services. Citrix has discovered that mobile advertisements now reach an audience almost double that reached in 2013.

Even with such growth, mobile ads generate less than two percent of a subscriber’s daily mobile data volume and only one-in-twenty subscribers are currently served video ads. Citrix projects dramatic growth in the number of subscribers touched by video ads and the data volume attributable to video ads. Such growth will be driven, in part, by such dynamics as auto-play for video ads, as introduced by Facebook in December 2013. In an interesting twist, 59 percent of Citrix consumer survey respondents believe that mobile ads do not count towards their monthly data quota. Health apps are one of the fastest growing mobile application categories. According to the consumer survey, 52 percent are using their mobile health apps more now, as compared to when it was first downloaded.

Within the health category, the top 10 most popular by subscriber usage are related to fitness and running, weight loss and nutrition, and women’s health. With the rise of wearable devices Citrix predicts an increasing impact of health apps on overall network data traffic as these devices integrate more fitness and mobile health apps into their functionality. Twitter’s introduction of video sharing site Vine last year and the integration of video into Facebook’s Instagram have driven a dramatic increase in social video sharing.

As a consequence, the data content on social networks now consists of 32 percent video, while images contribute 63 percent and text contributes five percent. With regards to its contribution to subscribers’ daily mobile data volume, social networking consumes eight percent on average, although this percentage fluctuates significantly by operator and region. For example, social network data traffic in Europe and the United States is responsible for 18 and 16 percent, respectively, of all data volume. In contrast, only four percent of overall data traffic is attributable to popular social networking sites in the Asia-Pacific region.

The findings in the Citrix Mobile Analytics Report are generated from the ByteMobile mobile data traffic reporting solution. The Mobile Analytics Report anonymously sources data traffic statistics from 3G and 4G networks of the Citrix global tier-one customer base. The consumer survey was conducted by Wakefield Research on behalf of Citrix.

To view the complete report visit the link below.