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Mobile advertising is still a very young market in the US, as mobile web usage here has lagged after many other countries due to inferior access to quality mobile devices and services. But mobile usage is growing as access has improved, which means the opportunity for mobile advertising has, too.

Besides mobile advertising efforts by giants like Yahoo, Google and AOL, perhaps the best-known mobile ad startup to go after the U.S.’s emerging mobile market is San Mateo, Calif.-based AdMob.

However, a growing market attracts competitors, especially when it is as lucrative as advertising is in the US — a large, Singapore based company called BuzzCity arrived in the US last year.

BuzzCity has recently announced a 917 percent annual growth in the number of page views that users have accessed that show its ads, with 132 million pages being viewed in the US over the first three months of this year. It expects to reach more than 100 million US ad views per month by the end of this quarter. It has also landed big clients, including Coca-Cola.

The company, which also runs mobile social network myGamma, has a mobile advertising network that operates in more than 70 countries around the world, with more than 2,000 mobile publisher sites running its ads. Like its competitors, the company serves both text and banner ads on mobile devices, and offers advertisers analytics services to target and track ad campaigns.

Overall, the network’s top ten markets served two billion ads, which represented annual growth of 800 percent. Here’s where the US fits in to BuzzCity’s world market:

1. Indonesia : 654 million (+ 13328%)
2. India : 577 million (+ 1522%)
3. South Africa : 426 million (+ 418%)
4. USA : 132 million (+ 917%)
5. Kenya : 79 million (+ 424%)
6. Romania : 57 million (+ 446%)
7. Bangladesh : 53 million (+ 305%)
8. China : 37 million (+ 6053%)
9. Brunei : 35 million (+ 221%)
10. Pakistan : 35 million (+ 814%)

How does this stack up with AdMob. According to AdMob’s latest report (PDF here), it had nearly 2.6 billion ad views last month alone, with 1.5 billion of those in the U.S.

Mobile life is blooming. Some 47 mobile social network companies have emerged globally, to help cater to our need to message and communicate while on the go.

But what about the huge incumbents, like MySpace or Facebook? Will they thrive on the mobile web?

Well, the 47 mobile-only networks will probably tell you that mobile is a whole different animal, and downplay the threat of a switch by their millions of users to those big guys. But in reality, even though some mobile-only social networks have gotten big — Mocospace, for example, has 1 billion page views worldwide, most of it in the US — their computer-based rivals are catching up now that new wireless devices, such as the iPhone, are making it easier for internet apps to transition to mobile.

My goal for this article was to find the top ten most significant social mobile companies.

It was difficult reporting. With so many different players competing in the mobile social network space, we’re seeing a lot of different approaches and fragmentation. For my own thinking, I sketched out a diagram during lunch with an entrepreneur (see above for a cleaned up version of it). It’s partly based on generalizations, but it’ll give you an idea of what’s happening here in the U.S.

I’ve organized the mobile social companies into four groups. In addition to heavyweights MySpace and Facebook, I’ve picked eight companies — based on market share, differentiation through features, niche market and technology — that seem to be emerging as the most significant players.

[Disclosure: I consult for one of the companies named here, Peperoni.]

Group 1: The internet heavyweights – MySpace and Facebook
When I talked to MySpace and Facebook to see what kind of uptake they’d been seeing on their mobile sites (eg. m.myspace.com) I got quite a surprise. According to the user numbers they provided, both companies have already passed Mocospace.

MySpace’s Brandon Lucas, Senior Director of Mobile Business Development told me MySpace Mobile USA had 1.4 billion visits last month. That’s compared to 1 billion visits to Mocospace this March, according to Mocospace CEO Justin Siegel. A source at Facebook confirmed to me that Facebook Mobile has also passed Mocospace’s numbers in the USA, too, but didn’t give me specific numbers. Expect announcements on that in the coming weeks.

MySpace Mobile launched in December 2006, followed by Facebook Mobile a month later. The growth of MySpace Mobile and Facebook Mobile is mainly due to operator deals that put them “ondeck.” MySpace and Facebook are looking to close as many deals with operators as possible. For Myspace Mobile, the goal is to be available on-deck with “every major operator, everywhere,” Lucas says. As of now, MySpace Mobile has signed 23 carriers in 13 countries, and we expect the number to rise. M-Metrics told MySpace Mobile around three weeks ago that they are the fastest growing mobile site in the US, says Lucas.

The barrier to traffic growth, according to Lucas, is awareness. Expect more banner ads for MySpace Mobile on its web site very soon to raise awareness. MySpace is willing to split revenue with operators, he says. Despite the split, “mobile advertising has grown in the last six months to be a real business for us”, he adds. He sees MySpace as playing the same role on mobile devices as it does on the web. He wants MySpace to be a “mobile advertising driver” for the industry — and wants to lure the brands advertising on its online version to add mobile advertising too. He said MySpace Mobile “wants to build a business for everybody” and that “we will share insights for everybody to profit.”

I also asked Lucas to comment on a MySpace strategy statement I came across in Stuart Dredge’s recent article on social mobile networking in New Media Age: ”We expect that half of our total traffic will be coming from mobile devices within the next five years,” the article quoted a MySpace representative as saying. Brandon said that’s a January quote from MySpace CEO Chris De Wolfe and reaffirms that mobile is one of the Read the rest of this entry »