we’d have to disagree with the comment that Google’s inaccurate mobile web reporting “isn’t much of a problem now, with the mobile web in its infancy. With only a limited number of click-throughs on mobile ads anyway, not many are pouring over the analytics of their mobile campaigns.” we pour over every piece of data that we can find to help make decisions – especially when there’s a dearth of reliable mobile web information!

a recent Jupiter Research study of U.S. mobile web sites revealed some promising mobile web usage trends (ex.: 40% of websites had launched a mobile version of their site and another 22% were planning to do so this year, 25% of U.S. cell phone owners have browsed the mobile web and 16% do so regularly). an interesting stat for us – only 3% of advertisers had placed ads on mobile sites so far…what’s holding them back?!

well, we know one thing that’s badly needed for the mobile web to take off: better mobile web analytics. as “experienced” mobile web publishers, we still haven’t found analytical tools that give us consistently reliable information. there’s also a big discrepancy in the reporting stats that AdMob and Google Mobile AdSense provide for ad impressions on our site – even though we show ads from both platforms equally. please let us know if you find any good mobile analytic tools!

when we look forward to “open” platforms and networks in the coming years, we should first look back and credit apple for creating these opportunities. it was the iphone that made the mobile web seem cool for consumers and helped increase traffic to mobile website like ours.

as the iphone became hugely successful, the non-iphone carriers found themselves unexpectedly on the outside-looking-in. all of a sudden, none of these carriers wanted to be excluded from another iphone-type situation (i.e. well known brand like google creating the next big thing in mobile) – and so participating in google’s open handset alliance became a competitive necessity. then before you know it, verizon said it was going to open up its network.

so thank you apple for helping to open up an entire industry with one phone…

we haven’t decided whether or not to build a mobile social networking app for android to extend/complement our mobile site, but it was interesting that social networking was listed as the first suggested focus area for the android developer challenge.

as mobile social networking app developers, the holy grail for us (dating back to our research while at the MIT Media Lab) has always been getting access to a user’s contacts on their cell phone. if you think about it, a user’s cell phone contact list is their most personal and most important social network: i might have hundreds or thousands of email contacts and/or friends on myspace, facebook, etc., but only my most important contacts are listed in my cell phone’s address book.

it looks like android is finally going to give mobile social developers access to a user’s cell phone contacts. since mobile social apps need to be available on a wide number of carriers/handsets in order to really take off, let’s hope other mobile platforms being to open up as well…

in talking with sidekick users, we frequently heard them wish that their sidekicks had mobile video capture/playback capabilities. so, did anybody else find it ironic that tmobile is promoting the new sidekick slide & LX with a user-generated video contest on myspace…when the new sidekicks still don’t have video capabilities? seems like a painful tease for sidekick owners .

we’ve been happy using AdMob’s ads for a long time now. in fact, our CTRs and CPMs were significantly higher for our mobile traffic using AdMob than they were for our online site using AdSense. it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, but suffice it to say we’ve been very happy with AdMob so far.

we were intrigued by stuff we had read online about other mobile publishers seeing spikes in traffic from mobile AdSense. well…we can verify that we’re seeing almost the exact same results: large spike in traffic from mobile AdSense, but higher CPMs from AdMob than from AdSense.

if you’re a mobile web publisher, try a combo of AdMob and Google for your site and let us know if you see different results.

a funny thing started happening after the iPhone’s launch this past summer: we noticed our mobile web traffic on our m.moblastic.com site started to pick up significantly without any additional marketing/product changes on our part.  even though we don’t have that many iPhone users, the iPhone’s great mobile web browsing experience seems to have raised the profile of the mobile web & convinced consumers that web browsing from your cell phone could actually be a good thing.

just like a lot of our users, we’ve also decided that the mobile web can be a good thing .  we’ve got some new mobile web initiatives that we’ve been working on for a while now…stay tuned and bear with us as we roll them out!

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