Just when you think that there is no hope for the economy, much less mobile Internet advertising. AdMob publishes some really wonderful numbers. It seems that mobile ad requests and ad inventory is almost even. For example, in the U.S., the total ads requested by mobile web sites were 1.99 billion, and 1.79 billion were served. According to the report, part of the reason that the number of ads served is that AdMob is starting to not serve ads to low traffic sites.

The sad part of the report is a breakdown of the capabilities of the phones used in the U.S. vs. the rest of the world. In places like India and Indonesia, approximately 80% of phones accessing AdMob ads can handle streaming video. Meanwhile, the U.S. with its highly desired advertising market, only has 27% of phones that can handle streaming video.

This has been a really busy week in Silicon Valley. This week, we saw that debut of two great new events for mobile. Mobile events have been popping up like mushrooms lately. But I really have to give high points to the two events that I attended yesterday.

The first was the Mobile Content and Marketing Expo held on Oct 6-7 in San Jose, CA. It was the first time this event was held and had a few hundred people attend, but the networking was excellent. Quite literally, the first person that I spoke to was Alan Meckler, better known to the world at large as the CEO of Jupitermedia. This conference is Jupitermedia’s event, and he was taking time out of his busy schedule to personally check out how the conference was running. Since he had a flight back to New York to catch in half an hour, he pointed out Jupitermedia’s editor for the mobile apps blog, Todd Ogasawara. All this on the second and last day of the conference. I just wish that I had been able to attend both days.

The conference attendees were some of the most knowledgeable people in mobile working on the cutting edge. The only keynote that I was able to attend was the one given by Skyfire’s CEO, Nitin Bhandari. His idea of monetizing “pinch units” in ad sales as the mobile equivalent of enhanced page views was interesting, but I am not sure how it could be done.

AdMob sponsored a great event for iPhone developers at a restaurant called Astaria in San Mateo. Not only were the talks and demos great, but restaurant managed to feed a standing room only crowd of about 100 developers. A very difficult task indeed. I really hope that this Meetup continues. I always get such great ideas talking to mobile developers who are releasing great apps.

Yesterday TechCrunch held its first ever conference, MobileBeat 2008. Judging be the last minute addition of extra chairs, I would have to say that it was a complete success.

When I initially signed up for the conference, I figured it would be good just from the big names that we going to be speaking. But it was not just the prestige of the speakers that I liked. It was that they had expert experience across such a wide range of the mobile arena. The speakers ranged from

• the VC behind the iFund for new iPhone apps to a rep from AT&T,
• the head of Google Android to the head of all things mobile at Google that were not Android,
• the head of a company with a branded product that made it easier for people to share their cell phone photos and video with their social network to the head of a company whose one-step solution to email users photos from their phones to their email address is completely white labeled to the biggest wireless carriers.

The part that I liked best was the hard data supplied by many of the companies. For example, thanks to the iPhone, Nielsens reported that data use increased 50x where the iPhones are. Loopt confirmed that they are seeing a 47x increase in data use on their network from the iPhone. The piece of hard data that I liked best was provided by AdMob. They served 3.5 billion ad impressions in a month, which is up 10x from 12 months ago. They are also able to charge higher amounts for CPC and CPMs than on equivalent ads on the Internet. For example, in a branded mobile ad campaign, AdMob is charging between $10 to over $30 CPM with the highest rates going to iPhone ads. A well-placed text CPC can be $0.20, but they are only able to charge about $0.03 for CPC on social network pages. (It just goes to show that Facebook has a great deal of work to do to finally become profitable.

There was one part of the conference that I hated. At the start of the conference, they announced that JawBone was going to be GIVING AWAY their Bluetooth headsets to anyone with a conference badge. You know that the conference is special when a company is giving away $10k - $20k of their $120 devices. Even Sun’s free server program is not this sweet.

The part that I hated was that all the headsets had been given away by the time that I got there. It’s my own fault for networking so hard and not wanting to miss a minute of the conference. I was told that at one point the line wrapped all around the conference area. You would have thought that you were standing outside of an Apple store on the first day of a new product release.

Yesterday I attended MobileMonday. It is a really great venue to find out the latest and greatest on the mobile web space. It is always packed, and last night was no exception.

Often the meeting focuses on a new mobile gadget or application. Last night, the focus was pulled back a little further to provide a bigger picture of the mobile web and mobile ad area. But we could not completely escape seeing new apps. AdMob is about to open beta testing on a new mobile analytics package. It seems very similar to the look and feel of Google Analytics but of course is focused just on the mobile area. Instead of getting a report of which browsers your users are using on your site, you can find out which carriers and which mobile devices they are using. Combine this feature rich data with a slick interface and you get a mobile marketer’s dream. Combine it with the price, FREE, and you get an easy way for companies to investigate how useful the mobile web is for them.The reason that it is free is that it will give AdMobs the best source of valuable data into the mobile ad market, which is predicted to be worth billions.

The most interesting point from the AdMob’s presentation is that AdMob is currently used on 5500 mobile sites. I would love to know what percentage this is of all mobile sites. If anyone out there has an estimate, let me know.

The promise of AdMob’s Analytics is great, but Opera presented their measured data on the state of the mobile web. This includes breakdowns on most popular websites across specific countries and how quickly number of users are growing. One thing that I found interesting was that the average user is viewing 202 pages per month and that WAP sites, which were never very popular, are becoming a smaller percentage of the number of sites being visited.