We like to give as much space as pos­si­ble to up-and-com­ing firms on these pages; but every now and then, one of Adland’s Goliaths gen­er­ates news that just can’t be ignored. Like YouTube, for instance: its VP of Sales, Lucas Wat­son, has just announced that mobile adver­tis­ing rev­enues at the video-shar­ing site have tripled in the last six months alone.

Pro­mo­tion­al spend­ing has been chan­neled into mobile as nev­er before to keep up with the bur­geon­ing uptake of hand-held devices amongst YouTube’s 1 bil­lion glob­al vis­i­tors: around a quar­ter of them now use mobile gad­gets to access the site, Wat­son revealed.

A bur­geon­ing market

No one work­ing in mobile adver­tis­ing will be sur­prised at this: eMar­keter Inc. recent­ly pro­ject­ed U.S. mobile video-ad sales to rise to $2.69bn by 2017, a 10-fold expan­sion on 2012 dri­ven by faster wire­less con­nec­tions and the expo­nen­tial uptake of smart­phones and tablets.

While Wat­son was a lit­tle cagey about spe­cif­ic fig­ures, Wedge Part­ners Corp. ana­lyst Mar­tin Pykko­nen esti­mates that YouTube accounts for 10 per cent of Google’s total rev­enue. Crunch­ing the num­bers fur­ther, he fig­ures that mobile adver­tis­ing sales con­tributed to around 20 to 25 per cent of YouTube’s total rev­enue for Q2 2013. With Google’s over­all sales total­ing $14bn for the quar­ter, that works out as $350m in sales com­ing from mobile video ads.

Research from Nielsen Hold­ings NV shows that 70 mil­lion U.S. mobile users were on YouTube’s app in March this year, a rise of 42 per cent on the same time last year. That takes the total to over half of US smart­phone users.

App shift

With the app fea­tured on all Android OS devices and a new (and immense­ly pop­u­lar) stand­alone app avail­able as a down­load from Apple’s App Store, it’s lit­tle won­der that mobile sales are soar­ing.  After Apple Inc.’s deci­sion to drop YouTube as a core app in the iOS last year, down­loads of the stand­alone app have skyrocketed.

New data for May 2013 from ana­lyt­ics firm Dis­ti­mo shows that the YouTube app is the most pop­u­lar non-gam­ing app on iOS by far, and Apple’s own stats reveal it to be the fourth most pop­u­lar app ever dur­ing the same month.

Not bad for a prod­uct that’s only been avail­able for eight months. No won­der its mobile rev­enues are blast­ing through the stratosphere.