MUMBAI: With the growing popularity of mobile consumption and the rise in availability of smartphones, the global mobile advertising revenues are forecast to touch $11.4 billion in 2013 up from $9.6 billion in 2012, according to a report by research firm Gartner.

The worldwide revenue will grow by a further 400 percent to reach $24.5bn in 2016 with mobile advertising revenue creating new opportunities for application developers and advertising networks. The new opportunities would also include mobile platform providers, specialty agencies and communications service providers in certain regions.

Gartner research director Stephanie Baghdassarian said, “The mobile advertising market took off even faster than we expected due to an increased uptake in smartphones and tablets, as well as the merger of consumer behaviour on computers and mobile devices. Growth in mobile advertising comes in part at the expense of print formats, especially local newspapers, which currently face much lower ad yields as a result of mobile publishing initiatives.”

A large adoption of handsets for digital content consumption in Japan and South Korea has given the Asia-Pacific region an early lead in mobile advertising worldwide. Looking forward, the high-growth economies of China and India are expected to contribute increasingly to mobile advertising growth, as the expanding middle class presents an attractive market for global and local brands.

Gartner VP research Andrew Frank said, “Smartphones and media tablets extend the addressable market for mobile advertising in more and more geographies as an increasing population of users spends an increasing share of its time with these devices.”

However, North America and Western Europe will close the gap on Asia-Pacific as the mobile channel gets more integrated with 360-degree advertising campaigns, eating up budgets historically allocated to print and radio. Consumer multitasking will drive preference for multiplatform approaches, which will blur the lines between channels and make it difficult to eliminate category overlap.

Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa will see mobile advertising growth being aligned with technology adoption and the stabilization of emerging economies, but they will mostly be driven by large markets such as Russia, Brazil and Mexico.

The report states that mobile display ad spending will grow and take over from mobile search. It will initially remain divided between in-app and mobile web (in-browser) placements reflecting consumer usage although after several years of in-app dominance, web display spending will take over in-app display from 2015.