Google CEO Eric Schmidt appeared on CNBC yesterday afternoon and proclaimed that mobile ads were a bigger opportunity for the search giant than the desktop, and this would be the year that its mobile
efforts start paying off. "We can more money in mobile than the desktop eventually because the mobile computer is more targeted," Schmidt told CNBC's Jim Cramer. "Think about it: You carry your phone
everywhere. It knows all about you...over time we will make more money from mobile advertising."
Henry Blodget of Silicon Alley Insider thinks that's a pretty dubious claim. For Google to
make more money from mobile advertising than the $20 billion it makes annually from the desktop, Blodget says the mobile ad market would first have to grow from $1 billion a day to around $50 billion.
Even then, he's making the generous (to say the least) assumption that Google could control half the market. "Is that possible?" he asks. "Anything's possible. Is it something investors should count
on?" Certainly not on Eric Schmidt's say so.
Before entertaining such assumptions, Blodget says he'd like to see just one example of a targeted mobile ad "that won't annoy the hell out of
the user." He adds: "We gave up on the breathless 'mobile's gonna be huge' promise about five years ago. We're also just not buying that crap about Starbucks zapping us with coupons as we walk by. All
that would make us do is want to throw our phones through the window. And we're not yet persuaded that the market for folks searching for "pizza" from their geo-located mobile phones is, in fact,
ginormous."
Read the whole story at Silicon Alley Insider »