With over 30 per­cent of Amer­i­cans own­ing Smartphone’s, Mobile adver­tis­ing is a nascent and fast grow­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty, accord­ing to Busi­ness Insider.

Mobile adver­tis­ing is a type of adver­tis­ing dis­played on phones or oth­er mobile devices such as iPads. There are sev­er­al dif­fer­ent types of adver­tis­ing such as text, graph­ic images as well as ani­mat­ed ads. Fur­ther­more, 50 per­cent of all pur­chas­es are pre­ced­ed by an Inter­net search and more than $1 bil­lion is spent on mobile adver­tis­ing each year. This num­ber is expect­ed to reach $4.39 bil­lion by 2015 which means work­ing in mobile adver­tis­ing or dig­i­tal media jobs is like­ly a good idea since the indus­try seems to be growing.

Anoth­er indus­try that you can work in is the devel­op­ment of mobile apps. Mobile apps, for­mer­ly referred to as mobile appli­ca­tions, are soft­ware devices for hand­held devices such as smart­phones and tablets. This might include a game or an appli­ca­tion to help you find a local restau­rant, keep track of your expens­es or track how many steps you walk each day. It takes times to learn how to devel­op mobile apps, but income can be lucra­tive if you become a tal­ent­ed devel­op­er. This is because you can sell the appli­ca­tions you devel­op through a num­ber of venues. This is just one of the many types of social media jobs that exist.

Mobile appli­ca­tions can be pur­chased through via the Apple App Store, Google Play, Black­Ber­ry App World and the Win­dows Phone Mar­ket­place. Some mobile appli­ca­tions are free, but more com­plex ones have to be pur­chased. The Ama­zon App store is anoth­er mar­ket­place for mobile applications.

Despite which media indus­try you choose to work in (mobile adver­tis­ing vs. mobile apps), you might want to get a com­put­er sci­ence degree or take online cours­es, which teach you how to build mobile appli­ca­tions. You will need to learn how to work with com­put­er pro­gram­ming lan­guages such as HTML and JavaScript before you learn how to build mobile appli­ca­tions. How­ev­er, this can lead to a sta­ble career, which is what you may be look­ing for.

In addi­tion, mobile adver­tis­ing and the num­ber of indi­vid­u­als using smart­phones is increas­ing which means your skills will like­ly be in high demand for years to come. There­fore, even if tak­ing col­lege cours­es on how to build mobile appli­ca­tions costs sev­er­al thou­sand dol­lars, it might be well worth it.

The mobile appli­ca­tion mar­ket is a multi­bil­lion-dol­lar mar­ket, which is good news for any­one look­ing for mobile adver­tis­ing or mobile appli­ca­tions jobs. If you would like to put things in per­spec­tive, Apple had approx­i­mate­ly $1.78 bil­lion in mobile appli­ca­tions sales in 2010, accord­ing to Com­put­er­world. This is one com­pa­ny that you might con­sid­er work­ing for as a mobile devel­op­er. There are many jobs avail­able as a mobile appli­ca­tion developer.

More than 12,253 appli­ca­tions jobs are avail­able on Indeed.com as a mobile appli­ca­tion devel­op­er. It’s even pos­si­ble to land a six-fig­ure job as mobile appli­ca­tions devel­op­er. The top earn­ers in earn approx­i­mate­ly $115,000, but you need exten­sive pro­gram­ming expe­ri­ence which could take as lit­tle as one to two years to learn depend­ing on how much work and effort you’re will­ing to put into your edu­ca­tion.  Either way, mobile adver­tis­ing and mobile appli­ca­tion devel­op­ing jobs are here to stay!