The Asia-Pacific market has seen mobile ad spending surge over the past year, according to new data from real-time ad platform Smaato, which today released its Q1 2017 Global Trends in Mobile Advertising Report. Mobile spending with Smaato in the APAC region climbed 14 per cent over the last year, with China in particular demonstrating huge growth.

The report analysed data from over 300bn mobile ad impressions served each month on Smaato’s platform for mobile publishers and app developers, and hound that mobile ad space is more valuable than ever before, with global eCPMs up by almost 50 per cent year-on-year.

China’s growth drove much of that increase, with first quarter ad spending up 90 per cent from Q1 2016. This was more than twice that of the next fastest-growing Top 10 market, Australia, which saw mobile spending up 37 per cent year-on-year.

While China continues to be a mobile ad juggernaut, some of APAC’s impressive Q1 growth can be attributed to the Lunar New Year, which fell on 28 January. With more than 20 per cent of the world’s population celebrating this event, mostly in the APAC region, Smaato saw unique device figures spike on this date, and countries that celebrated the holiday saw 18 per cent higher ad revenues on average than neighbouring non-celebrating countries.

In addition to insights from China, the report gave a glimpse into global differences in the mobile ad market, such as the fact that mobile ‘prime time’ differs from country to country. In the US and UK, mobile ad views and spending peak on weekdays at 7-11pm and 3-9pm, respectively. However, in Japan, this happens much later, between 7pm-1am, and in China, mobile usage is much more consistent throughout the day.

“The data across our global platform indicates that advertisers are catching on to how consumers increasingly spend their time in app,” said Ragnar Kruse, co-founder and CEO of Smaato. “When advertisers understand the value of the long-term tracking capabilities of in-app advertising, combined with rich audience data, we expect to see the eCPMs of in-app advertising increase by 50 to 100 per cent until 2019.”