The Problem with Mobile Banner Ads

I have been thinking about mobile advertising quite a bit of late. In my last blog I shared news of the mobile Internet reaching critical mass.

Within that report was a graphic showing the Motorola RAZR as the most popular device for mobile Internet browsing. This news got me to thinking about how the mobile internet is funded, then to thinking about mobile advertising in general, and before long I was thinking about the basic problems with mobile banner ads. Anyhow, follow with me on this one:

The screen size of the Motorola RAZR many other popular phones) is 176x220 pixels.  And according to the Mobile Marketing Association, the standard banner size for a screen the size of the RAZR is 168x28.  Which got me to wondering – just how big is 168x28 on a small RAZR screen anyhow? Turns out it is quite big – 12.15% of the usable screen space big.

And how do mobile banner ad sizes compare to traditional desktop Internet advertising? Most websites are created to support screen sizes of at least 800x600. And according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) the standard size for a full banner ad is 468x60. 

Using the same math as above, I realized that a typical desktop Internet banner takes up a mere a 5.85% of screen space. My comparison, this is less than half that of banner ads on a typical mobile device.

From an advertiser’s perspective, I suppose this means that mobile banner ads are great – you’re capturing almost twice as much of the user’s screen space. From the user’s perspective, though, that means that much of your valuable, limited screen space, that you want to use to interact with whatever software you’re using to accomplish your goals, is being taken up by the ad. How irritating! And from the software developer’s perspective, that means that you are even more restricted in what you can show the user on each screen, simply because you don’t really have 176X220 pixels to work with, you only have 176X102 pixels or so. How irritating!

It’s no wonder I have an aversion to mobile banner ads. They are far more intrusive and interfering than the desktop Internet. Mobile advertising needs to take a new approach, to become a benefit to the user’s experience, not an obstacle to it.