Research firm Gartner has projected mobile advertising spending will reach $2.7 billion globally this year, jumping a full $1 billion above 2007 levels.
By the end of 2011, Gartner expects that market to grow to $12.8 billion. Furthermore, that impact could be disproportionately higher in the U.S., due to its higher levels of mobile Internet usage.
Driven in part by the greater availability of 3G, but mainly attributable to the ready availability of cheap unlimited data packages, 40 million mobile subscribers are active users of the mobile Internet—roughly 15.6% of all U.S. subscribers. Compared to the U.K. at 12.9% and Italy at 11.9%, a far greater percentage of U.S. mobile users are surfing the mobile Web and exposing them to the advertising embedded within.
As more advertising and marketing dollars make their way to the mobile Web, measuring their impact becomes more important, says Telephony Magazine
Many of the mobile analytics companies use “Web beacons” or “bugs”, a tiny image the size of a pixel embedded in the browser that uniquely identifies a device. But not every device accepts such beacons.
Bango, a third-party mobile content distributor, developed a mobile analytics tool that reads unique identifiers, 
such as unique parameters offered by different phones, and can peg 99% of the devices traversing its customers’ sites as unique users. Once those identifiers are in place, Bango can use them to develop specific customer profiles.
Omniture uses DotMobi’s DeviceAtlas index to identify the make and model of the phone. DeviceAtlas contains attribute information for more than 5,500 devices around the world, including devices like the Apple iPhone, Research In Motion’s BlackBerry, Nintendo DS Lite and Amazon Kindle.
The database includes anything with a browser, including a Samsung refrigerator. Omniture then attempts to uniquely identify the owner of that phone.
The use of ad networks — companies that connect advertisers with publishers that have space to fill — surged six-fold from 2006 to 2007, according to a recent report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Bain & Co. (pdf).
The networks accounted for a mere 5% of total ad impressions two years ago but delivered nearly one-third of all online ads last year. Mobile ad networks include AdMob, Millennial Media and Third Screen Media as well as Google.
Some 32 percent of mobile data users say they are open to mobile advertising if it lowers their overall bill, according to a survey by Nielsen Mobile. The findings are from the bi-annual Mobile Advertising Report from Nielsen Mobile and are based on a survey of more than 22,000 active mobile data users who used at least one non-voice mobile service in the fourth quarter.
Google’s Mobile Blog announced Monday that YouTube mobile sites in the U.S. and Japan will begin inserting ads.
“This is our first step in testing mobile advertising for YouTube”, says Google’s Mobile blog. “It will give you a new way to interact with content on the go, while allowing us to learn how video viewers engage with mobile advertising. At YouTube, we are constantly testing new ways to deliver the kinds of ads that contribute to the user experience while making the most sense for advertisers, and we’ve learned a lot about what works for YouTube and what doesn’t”.
U.S. mobile-handset sales were down 13 percent in the second quarter compared to the same quarter in 2007, NPD Group said in a study released Tuesday. In total, mobile manufacturers sold 28 million U.S. units in the quarter, with more than 80 percent of Americans already owning a phone.
But demand for feature-rich phones is up, increasing to 19 percent of all mobile-phone sales in the second quarter, a 9 percent increase from the same period a year ago.
Paid Content says online advertising spending is estimated to be $600 to $800 billion. In the last year, Federated Media and Glam raised upwards of $50 million, while Microsoft paid $6 billion for aQuantive and Google bought Doubleclick for $33 billion.
