• The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday, November 8, 2006 11:30 AM

Mobile marketing is an area of Internet-based advertising expected to be a driving force in the ad business for years to come. But right now, the new medium is experiencing growing pains. For example, if you've got a phone that can play video, go to YouTube.com and you'll see a list of unusable text links and absolutely no video. The viral video site, like so many others, isn't formatted to fit on small cell phone screens.

But that may soon change--for YouTube anyway, as the Google unit is in the midst of negotiating a deal with Verizon Wireless that would offer its 57 million subscribers access to its videos. The deal reflects how content providers need to work with each individual carrier to make their broadband content accessible via the carriers' wireless networks. This presents an annoying hurdle to content providers; a middleman is needed to bridge the gap.

Under the current system, content providers have to buy their way onto the mobile provider's portal, which users see and the providers control when they log onto the mobile Web. This has resulted in a slew of exclusive deals in recent months--but not the large audience content creators crave, which is why a middleman is necessary.

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