Smartphone users are, en masse, expected to download more than 32 billion applications and games this year, generating revenues of more than $26 billion. That’s good for a staggering 30% year-on-year growth rate and it’s bound to be good news for content publishers and games makers. But there’s a sector that appears to be even more bullish: mobile advertisers.

According to the latest market forecast by Strategy Analytics, amid all this go-go growth in the global mobile media spend is one particularly promising nugget: the out-of-nowhere surge in ad buys that occur inside apps and games. “The strength of the apps ecosystem,” says Strategy Analtyics, “is also demonstrated by advertiser spend For example, across the USA and major Western European markets as a whole, revenue from display ads on the mobile web ($934.5 million) has been overtaken by in-app advertising ($1.7 billion).”

The in-app ad revenue in both markets has more than doubled year-on-year as the chart below shows:

Adds David MacQueen, Strategy Analytics’ Director of Wireless Media Strategies: “In the eyes of many advertisers, web browsing on the smartphone is playing second fiddle to the app economy.”

The other big gainer is video, but it’s not quite the revenue-generator, the researchers add. And, we can’t let this round-up close without a word about social media, or mo-so-lo as some geo-followers call it.
According to Strategy Analytics, mobile social media revs is expected to increase by 16.1 percent to $17.6 billion – accounting for 11.8 percent of all mobile media revenues.

Editor’s Note: We’ll be covering this high-growth area in much more depth on June 12 at Social Media Influence 2012. Come here some of the top thinkers and practitioners in the area of mobile, apps, gaming and tablets speak about what’s driving sales for their firms and what new innovations will drive the market tomorrow.