Commentary

Just An Online Minute... Will Mobile Ads Fly?

Next year, 3 million U.S. consumers will watch TV shows on their cell phones and, by 2009, that number will balloon to 15 million. That's one of the conclusions of a new eMarketer report about mobile entertainment.

"Within a few years, using your mobile phone simply to make a phone call may seem quaint," states eMarketer senior analyst Debra Aho Williamson in the report, "Mobile Entertainment: The Rise of the Very Small Screen."

And, as more subscribers turn to their cell phones for entertainment, advertisers surely will follow. Mobile video ad revenues probably will reach $25 million to $50 million in several years, predicts the report.

What form will the ads take? Pre-roll is an obvious choice, because TV watchers already are used to seeing video ads when viewing television, states the report.

But the Minute can't help wondering whether the viewing public actually will be all that keen on cell phone ads.

Consider: people are fast becoming accustomed to TV shows without ads--both at home, thanks to DVRs, and on-the-go, thanks to iTune's pay-per-download service. In the two months since Apple introduced its video iPod, consumers have downloaded more than 1 million videos of shows like "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost." All ad-free. And just this morning, Cingular Wireless announced a new agreement with the ad-free HBO to stream video clips of shows to cell phones.

Of course, mobile TV still is quite new. Consumers may well decide they're willing to watch a few ads--perhaps in exchange for free shows. But the Minute suspects that any such ads will have to be as entertaining as the shows themselves to succeed.

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