Mobile ads now reach an audience almost twice as large as in 2013. Yet despite that growth, mobile ads generate less than 2% of a subscriber’s daily mobile data volume and only one-in-20 subscribers are currently served video ads, according to the Citrix mobile analytics report released before MWC.
The quarterly report projects strong growth in the number of subscribers touched by video ads and the data volume attributable to video ads. Such growth will be driven, in part, by such dynamics as auto-play for video ads, as introduced by Facebook last December. Interestingly, 59% of the consumer survey respondents believe that mobile ads do not count toward their monthly data quota.
The report found that health apps are one of the fastest growing mobile app categories, with 52% using mobile health apps more now compared to when they was first downloaded. Within the health category, the top 10 most popular by subscriber usage are related to fitness and running, weight loss and nutrition, and women's health. With the rise of wearable devices such as FitBit, Nike+, and Pebble, Citrix predicts an increasing impact of health apps on overall network data traffic as these devices integrate more fitness and mobile health apps into their functionality.
Three factors contribute to the network load generated by mobile games: popularity, embedded video content and “addictiveness” – the overall time spent playing the game. In fact, 68% of respondents categorize themselves as being “slightly addicted” to at least one game on their mobile device.
Twitter’s introduction of video sharing site Vine last year and the integration of video into Facebook’s Instagram have driven a dramatic increase in social video sharing. As a consequence, the data content on social networks now consists of 32% video, while images contribute 63% and text contributes 5%. With regards to its contribution to subscribers’ daily mobile data volume, social networking consumes 8% on average, although this percentage fluctuates significantly by operator and region. For example, social network data traffic in Europe and the US is responsible for 18% and 16%, respectively, of all data volume. In contrast, only 4% of overall data traffic is attributable to popular social networking sites in the Asia-Pacific region.