A piece on the BusinessWeek site today, called “Mobile Ads: Not So Fast” caught my eye:
Ads on cell phones have long been hailed as the next big thing. But flipping through industry forecasts, Didier Kuhn says, “I don’t believe the figures I am seeing.” And he doesn’t mean that in a rah-rah kind of way.
Kuhn, CEO of a mobile advertising company acquired by Microsoft (MSFT) in May, views most analyst predictions as way too rosy. Gartner (IT) expects $11 billion in global revenue from ads on mobile devices by 2011, up from less than $1 billion a year now. Strategy Analytics sees an even bigger $14.4 billion revenue pie by then, accounting for a fifth of all online ad spending. These forecasts are “incredibly steep,” says Kuhn, relieved that his company, ScreenTonic, has Microsoft to watch its back as the market develops. “It will take slightly more time for the industry to grow.”
When did BW figure out that these analyst predictions might be just a tad optimistic? Because up until now, it’s been happy to feed the hype, repeating the same sort of wild predictions it today derides.
So which is it, BW? Or is this just another case where the media is happy to whip up the hype around something, just so it makes a nice, big, juicy target to knock down later?
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