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.

The FCC has ruled against Comcast on their breaking some of their users web traffic, especially to heavy traffic sites like BitTorrent. I had hoped that the FCC would come down hard on Comcast and force Comcast to rethink its treatment of customers. But sadly, there was no real punishment, not even a fine. And Comcast still feels justified in their treatment of their customers.

Such traffic shaping is frustrating to web site owners because it appears that our sites are not operating properly when it really has to do with the pipe between the user and the server.

If Comcast is having problems now, I don’t look forward to the next few years as streaming video becomes even more popular.

The title of this post, 10 hours for 1 minute, sounds like some sort of strange sci-fi alternate reality thing, where time flows by different amounts in different places. It actually is a measure of how much video is being uploaded to YouTube every minute.

Everyone knows that the amount of online video is increasing dramatically thanks to higher bandwidth connections and easy-to-use services like YouTube. Too easy from the point of view of copyright owners who are watching their content going online without their permission.

The U.K. government is also concerned, but less about copyright violations as cyberbulling, violence and other Internet safety issues. The U.K. government wants the online distributor to check the content before it is displayed on the web. But this is more difficult than it sounds.

Google claims that it gets 10 hours of video every minute. It is hard to imagine how many people they would have to hire to check all these video. On the plus side, if you like watching TV, Google may have a great job for you.

A few months ago, I blogged about the show “Gossip Girl” and the unusual moves that its owners had made. The show was both shown on traditional broadcast TV and streamed at the cwtv.com web site. But in May, the owners stopped streaming the show on the Web. I figured that they could not make money from the Web and that they were getting to much interest on the Web.

Today I found an interesting source that may have numbers on the general numbers for e case of content on broadcast vs. Web. I was listening to the ad:Tech podcast titled “Power Panel: Media and Entertainment - Programming, Distribution and  Advertising in a Multi-Platform World”

One of the speakers talked about the revenues of TV shows. He said that the revenue was $0.45-$0.60/hour broadcasted vs. $0.10/hour downloaded on the Net. I think that might have meant that normalized per user to provide a straight comparison.

If these numbers are to be believed, it is no wonder that Gossip Girl was pulled. The real question is how will the content owner get additional revenue when they have to start streaming Gossip Girl on the Web again. After all, it is just a matter of time.

News in the online ad world has been depressing lately. Even Google is struggling, and that is really saying something. It really makes Yahoo! look expensive now. But all is not lost.

A study released by the 4th Screen has shown that mobile pre-roll video ads are working well. At least, the audience is favorable when the other content is free and the ads are well-placed with respect to the content.

The panel at MobileBeat 2008 will probably have more to say on this topic on Thursday.