According to a recent study from eMarketer, by 2016, mobile ad spending is expected to exceed desktop ad spending and will completely dwarf it by 2019, when mobile will represent 72% of ad spending.

As of 2015, ad spending between desktop and mobile is about even with $29.89 billion going to desktop spending and $28.72 billion going to mobile. However, as of next year, thanks to a predicted 41% growth in mobile spending, mobile ad spending will represent around 60% of the market.

Just as desktop and mobile ad spending have been siphoning dollars from TV and print ad spending, mobile has slowly been chipping away at the money spent on desktop ads. One of the main reasons for the shift, as it always is, is due to user consumption. There has been a slow but steady shifty from PC use to mobile devices. In 2012, PCs had a slight advantage, but as of 2014, the average person spends 2 hours and 51 minutes a day using mobile devices, about half an hour more than they spend using a computer.

Based on data from eMarketer, it looks like most of the love will be going to in-app spending rather than on web based mobile ads. By 2016, just over a quarter of mobile dollars are expected to be going to advertising on web sites. This makes a fair amount of sense because even well-designed mobile sites are often just a mini-me version of their full-sized counterparts. I generally will only surf the web on my phone if there’s no other choice, a preference mirrored by the majority of people, who only spend about a fifth of their time using a mobile device in a web browser.

Another major advantage of app advertising over mobile web advertising is data collection. Although you can get user data from both the web and app usage, it would seem that you’d get richer data from how someone uses an app, which makes for better targeting data.

However, although app advertising looks to be the next big thing, at least for the next few years, mobile app install ads are not likely to be a main revenue source any time soon. Last year’s mobile app install ad spend was neligible according to eMarketer, and even after the best efforts from Facebook, Google and Twitter, it is only expected to represent about 20% of mobile ad spend this year.

Image Credit: Johan Larsson