Mobile Ad Inventory Won’t Meet Demand As Brands Cut Back On Mobile Ad Buys
Interest in mobile advertising is up, but inventory is not be keeping pace with demand, a trend that may only increase as we head towards a recession. Already, evidence is surfacing that big brands are cutting back on their mobile ad buys, which will make AdMob’s job more difficult since it already doesn’t have enough ad inventory to fill every request coming from publishers. AdMob has been closing the gap slowly, but it’s still not able to fill all of its ad requests. For instance, in the U.S., AdMob served 1.79 billion ads last month, but had requests for 1.99 billion, and globally, it served 4.53 billion ads compared to 5.07 billion requests. As a caveat, AdMob said sometimes it chooses not to send ads.
Your use of the word "inventory" in this post is confusing. You use it to refer to demand for ads, but in the industry this word always refers to the supply side, that is, the number of impressions available on ad networks to carry ads.
When you talk about brands cutting back on advertising spend resulting in less inventory, that is actually not correct. Inventory will continue to grow as mobile internet penetration grows, but demand for advertising will decline, thus inventory will grow but fill rates will drop.
I'm not trying to be pedantic, but it's an important distinction. Our industry is already very confusing to most outsiders / newcomers due to lack of standardised terminology, so those of us inside the industry need to be careful that don't add even more confusion by misusing terms that we already do use in a standard way.
I agree. This post should be re-written to conform to ad industry standards. Ad inventory is created by mobile publishers, demand is created by advertisers.