Last month, in a move that illustrates the growing traction of Russia’s mobile advertising market, the Mail.Ru Group’s service Target Mail.Ru started selling mobile advertising to all advertisers, as reported by RIA Novosti. The service was previously only available to selected customers.
Advertisers will now be able to place their own ads not only on the web but also on mobile versions of the Mail.Ru Group’s projects. Currently, click-through-rates (CTR), with the Android operating system are 2.43%, 1.45% for Windows Phone, and 1% on iOS.
Sberbank, Russia’s national savings bank, and Aeroflot, Russia’s largest airline, are among the first mobile clients of Target Mail.Ru.
A few weeks ago, Aeroflot launched a campaign on the mobile version of major social network Odnoklassniki, which is part of the Mail.Ru Group. It aims to promote the airline’s new mobile application and featured cross-platform deployment. With the help of a counter of the advertising system installed on its web site, Aeroflot was able to define a loyal audience pool (ie. those customers who had previously visited the site from any device). Aeroflot proposed its application for the mobile version of Odnoklassniki to these loyal users. On this application, the current CTR for Android users is more than 2.5% and for iOS is more than 4.5%.
A Google-dominated market
In spite of the recent massive traction of mobile Internet in Russia (around 90 million users this year, including both smartphone and feature phone users), the domestic market of mobile advertising has remained very small to date, reaching around $40 million in 2012, according to Pult Group’s managing director Nikolai Davidov.
But the market is growing extremely fast: expected to reach at least $111 million this year (according to eMarketer, or $150 million according to AdCamp), it could exceed the $1 billion mark by the end of the decade.
Currently, a sizeable fraction of the market is controlled by Google AdMob. In contrast to web search, where it lags far behind Yandex, the US giant benefits from its integration by default on Android-supported smartphones, in particular, which enjoy strong popularity in the country, as well as from its global deals with advertisers, Davidov noted.
A dozen of alternative mobile ad networks already compete on the domestic market, including WapStart and AdInch. Some of them have an important inventory but still generate small volumes.
Last month Pult Group and IMHO Vi launched a new ad network, AdCamp, while two venture funds announced a $3 million investment in mobile RTB platform AdMoment.
