YouTube’s mobile advertising revenue has reportedly tripled in the last six months, with up to US$350 million made in the first quarter of 2013 alone.
The figures are an estimate by Wedge Partners Corp analyst Martin Pyykkonen and were used alongside a Bloomberg interview with Lucas Watson, YouTube’s vice president of sales.
“The commercial business has exploded,” Watson said. “It’s a huge part of our business, and we know that’s where it’s headed.”
The ambitious calculations by Pyykkonen echo the theory of Morgan Stanley which in May said it thought YouTube would be a US$20 billion business by 2020.
Twenty-five per cent of YouTube’s global views come from mobile, with one billion a day.
One of the explanations for the sudden rise in mobile revenue however, has been its move away from being a native iOS app. This means it no longer comes pre-installed on the latest Apple devices.
When it was native, the YouTube app could not show adverts, but as a standalone app it can.
It has always been able to show adverts on the Android platform because YouTube is built into the Google operating system.
