YouTube apps for iOS and Android have helped Google triple its mobile ad sales in the past six months, the company said. YouTube mobile ads bring the company nearly $350 million in revenue, with about 1 billion users visiting the site in a quarter.
Lucy Watson, YouTube's vice president of sales, told Bloomberg that advertisers have started spending a lot more to build this audience and that it is now one of the biggest and most important parts of Google.
More than half of smartphone users in the United States used a YouTube app in March, according to data from Nielsen, with usage increasing after Apple decided to remove the built-in YouTube app from iOS, and Google's version has at least 70 million users in the United States, each of whom sees an ad before the video starts.
But the big challenge is keeping them engaged, according to Julie Ask, an analyst at Forrester Research. “People have less patience with mobile, and users want more interactivity,” she told Bloomberg.
To make it easier for companies that want to advertise only on mobile, YouTube automatically separates the ads they pay for between mobile and desktop. They can choose not to participate in either, but some companies choose to do both. EA is one of them.
