U.S. mobile advertising to triple this year fueled by Facebook, Google

Mobile device users are going to see more ads a lot sooner than researchers anticipated.

The U.S. mobile advertising market is growing swiftly. It will nearly triple this year to more than $4 billion, fueled by an uptick in advertising sales at tech giants Facebook and Google and also at Twitter, EMarketer said in a new report.

Google is expected to ring up nearly $2.2 billion in mobile ad sales this year, mostly from its search ad business. Facebook is expected to generate more than $339 million after rolling out mobile ads this year. Its track record in the third quarter selling mobile ads is “one major reason for the change,” EMarketer said. It called the growth rate “astonishing” and “unexpected.”

Twitter, which did not make money on mobile last year, will record nearly $135 million in mobile ad sales this year, EMarketer said.

But Facebook, which has rolled out several types of advertising for mobile phones, is expected to edge out Google as the top seller of display mobile ads with more than 18% of the market. Google comes in a close second with a 17% share.

It’s a big market up for grabs. EMarketer estimates that U.S. mobile ad sales will reach more than $7 billion in 2013 and nearly $21 billion by 2016.

But it’s still a tiny percentage of the overall U.S. advertising market. Right now mobile ads account for 2% of the ad market. By 2016, EMarketer expects mobile ads to account for 11%.

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