Location Based Market reduced by 2/3rds

Tuesday, March 23. 2010

Location Based Market reduced by 2/3rds

It would appear that 1/3rd of all mobile searches pertain to local information:

Speaking at a Mobile Marketing & Advertising event in Las Vegas to coincide with CTIA Wireless 2010, Diana Pouliot – director of mobile advertising at Google – revealed that one-third of all Google searches via the mobile web pertain to some aspect of the searcher’s local environment.

Not quite in the "whoddathunkit" bucket, but the interesting thing - to me - is the actual proportion. If I were making an hypothesis, I'd have thought it would be higher. This is all quite interesting, as to my mind only 1/3rd of searches being local militates against the hype-huged location based market. Interestingly, the article also notes that:

......some analysts now project that location-based mobile spending will top $4 billion in 2015. That’s a mind-blowing increase from the relatively paltry $34 million spent just last year.

The $4bn by 2015 estimate intrigues me, as just the other day estimates of $13bn by 2014 were being thrown around - we pooh poohed them at the time, and using our "half the amount estimated in double the time" rule for Planet Mobile we concluded the market would be more like $7bn by 2018* - which $4bn by 2015 is more-like than $13bn by 2014!.

The thing is, usually it takes 2 years for Planet Mobile to halve their heady early day forecasts. This has taken just 2 months. Clearly the Planet Mobile krew have already reacted to the new data. Planet Mobile meets Internet Time

I just hope somebody has told all the location based startups crowding onto the ground floor.......

*You'd be amazed at how accurate its been in the past

Posted by Alan Patrick in Mobile Web 2.0 & Multimedia at 21:37 | Comments (2) | Trackbacks (0)

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I'm also very skeptical about geolocation, for the simple reason that most people lead highly sedentary lives, not doing much besides the home-work-shops routine.
Not much scope besides discount coupons
and google's local adwords.
Maybe the jet-setting authors of these reports fail to notice average users lead a very different lifestyle.
I can see potential in local social networking but suspect these will face huge privacy problems. New types of flashmob become possible, with problematic side-effects like spontaneous gang formations... just imagine how local social networking could be used by football hooligans organising street battles... or the potential for ad-hoc lynching mobs... dark examples I know, but 100% likely to happen.
Nevertheless, this doesn't stop me from tinkering with geolocation on a personal project, hope to share results when finished.

#1 pedro on 2010-03-23 23:47 (Reply)

I agree, I read a New Scientist report that 93% of our time or somesuch is spent in very predictable locations.

I think you're right when you note that the early adopter demographic lives a totally different life to the mainstream.

As to the downsides, we've written about that more than many

#2 alan p on 2010-03-23 23:59 (Reply)

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