According to the findings of a new report from banking and investment firm Macquarie Group, approximately 5% of paid search spending in the US is now in mobile. However, the report notes that mobile search spend could double to 10% before the end of 2011 if growth continues at the current “aggressive pace.”
Using Efficient Frontier data, Macquarie Group estimates the value of 10% of mobile search spend to be approximately $1.1 billion. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of that cash would belong to Google.
Based on the finds of the report, a whopping 97% of mobile search spend goes to Google, with the remaining scant 3.2 percent going to Bing and Yahoo.
The data largely confirms what Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently admitted at an IAB event in Florida. That is, mobile is growing “faster than expected” and blowing all of his company’s internal projections out of the water. As it now stands, Google says that mobile search queries are responsible for approximately 15% of all search volume across every category.
When it comes to the origination of mobile Google searches, once again we’re seeing how the iPhone and Google represent a match match in mobile heaven.
We’ve seen data that shows that while Google absolutely dominates searches emanating from the iPhone (95%+), ~50% of iPhone Google searches come from the toolbar, 42% from Google’s homepage and less than 10% from Google’s app. This is an absolutely critical point, as it indicates that Apple has significant influence over Google’s mobile search share. If Apple were to make Bing the default search provider through its toolbar, Google’s share could be significantly impacted.
