Om Malik of Gigaom has a short post today about the sorry state of the Mobile Web here in the U.S.

According to Rethink Research mobile web accounts for “12 percent of average revenue per user in 2007, far below the expected 50 percent” while Yankee Group says “only 13 percent of cellphone users in North America use their phones to surf the Web.”

What I found most interesting in his post is that he quotes Omar Hamoui, Founder & CEO of AdMob (a mobile advertising start-up) as saying that in the last 30 days they have seen traffic from the iPhone double from .4% to .8%.

There is no question that the iPhone browser, and the inevitable ones that will follow, will give more life to the mobile web. The carriers putting together unlimited data plans, and the availability of quality content will also give the mobile web a push over the next few years.

There’s an article on the New York Times website today that’s worth a read although I think it is too negative. In my opinion, the mobile web will explode, and mobile advertising will quickly grow with it. Let’s not look at the poor acceptance of WAP in 2000 as an indicator of where we are now, and where we’ll be.

In 2000, the wireless application protocol was supposed to bring the Internet to the cellphone. Our hero turned out to be a flash in the pan. That was attributed to a lack of high-speed cellular data networks, so a frenzied and costly effort to build third-generation, or 3G, networks ensued.

“The user experience has been a disaster,” says Tony Davis, managing partner of Brightspark, a Toronto venture capital firm that has invested in two mobile Web companies.

While many phones have some form of Web access, most are hard to use — just finding a place to type in a Web address can be a challenge. And once you find it, most Web content doesn’t look very good on cellphone screens.

Things are changing quickly, and it’s gonna be an interesting ride.

“People talk about the mobile Web, and it’s just assumed that it’ll be a replica of the desktop experience,” Mr. Eagle said. “But they’re fundamentally different devices.” He says he thinks that the basic Web experience for most of the world’s three billion cellphones will never involve trying to thumb-type Web addresses or squint at e-mail messages. Instead, he says, it will be voice-driven. “People want to use their phone as a phone,” he says.

For now, widespread use of the mobile Web remains both far off and inevitable.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 25th, 2007 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Mobile Marketing, Mobile Web, Mobile Advertising. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.