LONDON, UK: Mobile phone operators in Britain have teamed up with digital market research firm comScore to measure mobile Internet usage in the first exercise of its kind, which they hope will jump start the mobile advertising market.

Advertisers are keen to target consumers via mobile phones, which have the advantage of being both highly personal and location-aware, but have been held back by factors including a lack of hard data about mobile media consumption.

According to IT researcher Gartner, global mobile advertising revenues likely reached about $530 million last year, and could jump to $13.5 billion by 2013.

Mobile operators own key data about how their customers use phones, but until now have been reluctant to exploit that knowledge for fear of raising privacy concerns.

"We got together a coalition of the willing and we said 'Let's try something,'" said Henry Stevens, who is responsible for mobile advertising at telecoms industry body the GSM Association (GSMA), at the launch of Mobile Media Metrics.

Stevens said it took almost three years of talking to get the project off the ground, but eventually Britain's five mobile operators agreed to provide anonymised Internet usage data to create the new product.

He said the GSMA hoped to repeat the exercise in other markets after Britain, which was chosen for its market size and relatively mature stage of development.

The data from Telefonica's O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and 3UK showed that 16 million people in the UK accessed the Internet from their mobile phone in December.

They viewed a total of 6.7 billion pages and spent 4.8 billion minutes online.

The top sites visited were Facebook.com, Google sites and Telefonica sites -- with comparable numbers of visitors -- but in terms of page views and minutes spent on the site, Facebook was far and away the most popular.

News Source:- http://www.ciol.com

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