For a simple question, “what is mobile?” can be surprisingly difficult. Most of the time when we’re asked, my IAB Mobile Center colleagues and I tend to talk about mobile as a social shift, a major change in the way people live their lives, keep up with friends, and stay informed and entertained. All of that is true, and should define media company and marketer strategies. But social shifts don’t necessarily make for straightforward revenue accounting practices, and so the IAB CFO Council and the Mobile Center collaborated on a brief survey of ad seller IAB members, asking them what they counted as “mobile” from a revenue perspective.
We’ve just released the results, in our 2014 IAB Mobile Revenue Recognition Survey. In terms of answering the question at hand, smartphone ad revenue is almost always mobile (93% of respondents), and tablet ad revenue is are generally considered mobile too (by 78% of respondents). Only 16% think of laptop ads as generating mobile revenue. Revenue from apps is almost universally considered mobile, while revenue from websites viewed on phones or tablets is much less so.
IAB believes that surveys like this one provide useful guidance to the industry, indicating emerging best practices and de facto standards that all ad sellers should consider when revamping their accounting systems to reflect the modern, cross-screen world.