• Business Week, Friday, December 14, 2007 11:30 AM

Mobile phone advertising has to be the next big thing--why else would Google, Microsoft and Yahoo spend untold millions on building mobile phone applications? The mobile business may yet deliver on its promise, but one industry source says that market research firms are painting way too rosy a picture when it comes to mobile spending predictions.

Gartner expects $11 billion in global revenue from ads on mobile phones by 2011. Strategy Analytics predicts an even bigger $14.4 billion, representing one-fifth of all online ad spending. Meanwhile, mobile phone spending in 2007 will be less than $1 billion.

To some it may be a foregone conclusion that the wireless carriers will one day forfeit control of the mobile Web, spawning a brave new era for mobile advertising. According to Jupiter Research, only 16 percent of wireless users access the Web from their mobile devices at least once per month, indicating that the audience is still a long ways away from having the kind of audience that's attractive to marketers.

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