Asian ad network reports surge in mobile advertising

The ever increasing allure of mobile advertising was reflected when BuzzCity, a global mobile advertising network, announced on Monday that it had served about 10.5-billion adverts across its mobile advertising network in May alone this year.

The company attributes this increase in adverts served to greater consumer demand for mobile content and being able to meet that demand with its own white-label content services, leading to record numbers in ads served on its mobile advertising network.

The company’s CEO, Dr KF Lai, in speaking about the success of the company’s model, said: “Content syndication is a cornerstone of our business strategy and is having a significant impact on BuzzCity’s growth. Demand is increasing for it, and testament to that is the diverse range of more than 1000 partners we have across the globe. White-label services like ours make sense, as many mobile strategies rely on quality and relevant content as an important element.”

The BuzzCity white label services include the various mobile sites owned by the company, such as Djuzz, JAMsked and Now-Cook. The aim of these sites is to satisfy mobile internet users’ insatiable demand for relevant, useful and entertaining content via their phones. Providing and sharing this content also provides a great context for advertisers to promote their brands.

BuzzCity, of course, would not be able to attract this kind of advertising traffic if it did not have significant visitor numbers across its various sites. DJuzz, the company’s mobile gaming site — from which it claims around 45 million games have been downloaded since January this year – and JAMsked, its mobile music listing site reportedly attract around three million unique visits a month.

BuzzCity claims its success comes largely on the back of “advances in technology in the mobile market”. These advances are not only happening in the smartphone market, which still only accounts for a fifth of the 1.6-billion mobile devices sold last year according to information technology and advisory firm Gartner. Most of the progress is occurring in the lower-end feature phone market, particularly in Asia.

Yahoo, for instance, last week announced a partnership with MediaTek, an Asian supplier of microchips for mobile phones, to integrate the global portal’s web services, such as instant messaging (IM) and email, into the kind of MediaTek microchip packages which are fitted into standard mobile phones.