Baltimore's Millennial Media files for IPO

Mobile advertising firm filed with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday

Analysts and industry observers believe the mobile advertising industry still has its greatest growth ahead of it. Smartphones and tablet computers are proliferating worldwide, and Millennial helps publishers serve advertising to mobile-device users who browse the Web or use applications on their phones.

In its filing, Millennial cited industry data from Gartner Inc., a technology research and advisory firm, that showed mobile app downloads from application stores will balloon from 17.7 billion last year to 108.8 billion in 2015. That means there are potentially billions of opportunities to show mobile ads to users.

As more advertisers shift their marketing budgets to mobile, Millennial expects to reap financial benefits. Citing Gartner statistics again in the filing, it said the worldwide mobile ad market will grow from $1.8 billion last year to $13.5 billion in 2015.

Millennial disclosed that more than 28,000 apps are configured to receive advertising from its ad-server platform — out of hundreds of thousands of apps in Apple's and Google's app stores alone. Millennial can deliver ads to 7,000 different mobile device types and models. The major mobile platforms it serves include Apple's iOS, Google's Android, Windows Phone, Research in Motion's BlackBerry, and Symbian.

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