Buzz City mobile ad network still growing strongly despite recession

BuzzCity is a mobile advertising network which isn't that big in Europe but in developing markets and to a less extent the US it is really pretty big. They release a Mobile Advertising Index report every quarter which makes some interesting reading.  First thing to note is that Buzz City is bucking the recession and still growing its inventory and sales.  Also Buzzcity is building the type of scale that can challenge the market leader admob, which is serving 5bn + ads per month.  Buzz City is approaching a similar scale.

In the 4th Quarter, just over 7.5 billion advertiser banners were delivered
across the entire network. This represents a Q-on-Q growth of 40%, a
slight increase from the previous quarterly growth rate (38%). 

By 31st December 2008 the advertising network has served some 19.5 billion advertising banners in 2008.

Top 5 countries

Buzz City is benefiting from really strong scale in developing markets like Indonesia:

Indonesia remains in top position and yet again showed very strong
growth (100%). Over the whole year some 7 billion banners were
served to Indonesian audiences. 

Obviously this traffic isn't that valuable but what might worry admob is that Buzz City is also seeing strong growth in the US market:

USA moved into 4th place with strong continued growth of 47% and 382m ads served

Another interesting point is that South Africa, which was once the real growth driver on mobile internet seems to be suffering a traffic decline.

This could be because Vodacom has put in a transcoder and apparently has been hiking GPRS tariffs.  It is a real shame to see South Africa apparently in decline like this - in an area where they lead the world in many respects. 

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