• by Ben Frederick  @mp_benfred, August 10, 2015

Many advertisers see video as the future of mobile advertising, and that vision is starting to get backed up by hard numbers.

Programmatic video supply-side platform (SSP) SpotXchange released an update from the first half of 2015, reporting growth and forecasting even more.

Mobile video has seen a parallel boom with the rise of programmatic. SpotXchange has seen an 800% increase in mobile video spend in the first half of 2015.

Though they couldn’t share the before and after numbers to put that eye-popping percentage into perspective, SpotXchange CEO Mike Shehan says about 20% of their ad spend is on mobile now, as compared to 4% at this time last year.

He foresees even more growth. “By this time next year,” he says, “[mobile] could be 50% of the overall media spend.”

However, Shehan believes the most interesting tidbit SpotXchange uncovered by looking at the data from the first half of this year may be the rise of private marketplaces for programmatic buying and selling.

More than 40% of the impressions managed on their platform happen through private marketplaces, a 112% increase year-over-year from 2014. Shehan says he thinks this growth may signal “the tipping point we’ve been waiting for” in programmatic.

Programmatic buying and selling has become a lot more sophisticated in the last year. As publishers get more comfortable using the tech, they’re also finding they have more control over when and where ads are served -- which is one of the main draws of private marketplaces.