YouTube is making a dramatic change to its mobile web presence. This week, YouTube revealed that it will begin incorporating advertising services throughout the mobile site.

Naturally, YouTube is optimistic that advertisers will find enormous value in placing adds for their products and services on YouTube’s mobile site – a mobile presence that realized a 160% traffic increase in 2009.

Adds will run across the home, search, and browse pages in both the US and Japanese mobile YouTube sites.

According to the YouTube Biz Blog:

The increased usage of high-end devices like the iPhone and Android is also making mobile advertising easier and more effective for advertisers.

“Test campaigns” are already underway by L’Oreal and Land Rover. Initial results indicate promising rates of click-throughs, positive user experiences, and greater brand awareness.

We’ve already seen some early campaigns run on YouTube’s mobile site by advertisers like Sony (for the DVD release of “District 9″) and Kia, both of whom were able to easily reach their target audience, no matter where they were looking for video.

The addition of advertising space to YouTube’s mobile website is not only of great interest to mobile marketers, it also comes as a blow to rabid YouTube critics claiming that YouTube would falter in finding new ways to create profitable revenue models.

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With news coming out of Barcelona — and the industry in general — being focused heavily on mobile apps, Bango has released some interesting stats related to mobile Web usage, proving that while apps are indeed a rapidly growing segment, the mobile browser remains the most important app on any mobile device.

Over the last 12 months, Bango has been analyzing traffic to a range of mobile Websites by sampling across 50 million phone users worldwide who have accessed third party mobile sites through its platform.  In the end, Bango realized a 600% growth in traffic, representing six times the amount of traffic recorded the previous 12-month period.

Interestingly, the average time on site was measured as 3 minutes, 21 seconds- averaged across user visits to all sites, compared with just over one and half minutes the previous year.  The analysis also measured the average number of pages viewed per visit at 5 pages, up from just over 2 pages per visit twelve months before.  These site-level figures have increased by an average of 230% compared to a year ago, with consumers visiting sites more frequently from their phones and browsing more pages over longer periods of time.  The key categories for mobile browsing are news, sports and general media sites (including newspapers), mobile content downloads, social networking and retail sites.

Bango attributes the continued growth in mobile Web usage primarily to smartphone usage, with Blackberry accounting for over 17% of the mobile devices recorded across sites.  The number of visits by BlackBerry users also exceeds any other device, including the iPhone.  Factoring in the relative sales growth across the different smartphone brands the data suggests that iPhone browsing has, if anything, slightly declined per user measured, which could be a result of consumers being directed towards apps instead of websites.

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It only seems logical for electronics juggernaut Best Buy to be on the forefront of marketing opportunities born of the mobile technology boom of the 21st Century. And while the company has dabbled in mobile marketing before, Best Buy seems to be gearing up for their most comprehensive mobile efforts yet.

According to sources at the company, Best Buy is putting the wheels in motion on a spruced up mobile website, more aggressive and targeted SMS texting campaigns, and mobile application updates to help capture a larger share of the mobile community’s attention.

It was just late last year that Best Buy introduced its mobile site and a corresponding iPhone application.

Best Buy’s chief marketing officer, Barry Judge, told the Wall Street Journal last month that his company “wants to use mobile to make standard ads more interactive. A print ad or billboard, for instance, might give consumers an address they could text-message for more information.”

“This is going to be a big area. It may dwarf what the PC Internet does,” Judge added.

Consequently, many market analysts expect Best Buy’s advertising budget to begin being more proportionately consumed by mobile efforts rather than by traditional print, television, and radio advertising.

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Motally, a mobile analytics startup, released an interesting report yesterday indicating that the US leads the world in terms of creating mobile sites with a substantial global audience — 80% of which, to be exact.

Specifically speaking, 80% of US-based mobile sites receive traffic from three of the seven major regions of the world — North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Oceania — with 72% of US-based mobile apps reaching an audience in four or more regions.

More generally speaking, 53% of sites and 41% of apps in Motally’s study drew visitors from all seven regions — not just one or two clicks, but significant traffic — signaling the benefit for mobile app and site developers who can reach a significant worldwide audience by utilizing a rather simple medium.  “Any investment should at least consider a global audience,” Motally indicated in its report.  “Mobile is an effective global platform.”

This is interesting to me given the fact that the US has always been lagging in terms of mobile technology when compared to other parts of the world.  With new-age media and mobile marketing and advertising channels emerging, it’s clear that the US has been a major player in advancing these technologies.  It also indicates the extreme potential mobile provides in reaching a target audience, whether that audience is your local community or the entire world.

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Coca-Cola is going mobile for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. The beverage giant is behind a new Olympic Games-themed program in the US that is aimed at on-the-go Olympic fans.

Consistent with the official word from Coke, the comprehensive campaign will feature high-profile Olympic champions and contenders known as the Coca-Cola “Six Pack” of athletes, limited edition Olympic Games-themed packaging, and “mobile media and digital experiences.”

Coca-Cola is working with NBC to bring the campaign to life, which includes a custom WAP site to support the effort at http://m.cokeopengames.com

According to Linda Cronin, director of media interactive communications at Coca-Cola, “We’ve established a first-of-a-kind partnership with NBC on the development of a co-branded mobile application that brings fans into the Vancouver experience by playing energetic, familiar sounds related to the Games like air horns and cowbells and the sounds associated with drinking a Coke—ice clinking, pouring, the first ‘ahh’—right on their iPhone and iPod touch.”

For the Vancouver mobile program, Coca-Cola, which is the exclusive nonalcoholic beverage provider to the Olympic Games through 2020, joined forces with IMC2, Dallas.

“We had a lot of success with this channel during the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games,” adds Cronin, “so we significantly increased our mobile commitment for Vancouver in order to deliver the excitement of the Games to fans no matter where they are.”

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Millennial Media has released it’s monthly “Scorecard For Mobile Advertising Reach & Targeting” (S.M.A.R.T) for December, 2009- where it pulls data from its massive network that reaches nearly 80% of the entire US mobile internet audience.

In terms of the mobile campaigns ran through Millennial Media in Q4 2009, the holiday shopping season had an obvious impact on users interaction and the types of ads being ran.  Average monthly pageviews per user increased to 125 in December from 113 in November, Q4’s average pageviews per user was 115 overall and average ad-requests per page held a quarterly average of 1.03 pages.

iPhone/iPod Touches, who have always had a stronghold in Millennial’s network, saw impressions decrease slightly, by .36% in December, while Q4’s average three-month growth rate for its devices was 15%.  Still, Apple remained the number one device maker with a 24.28% share of impressions in December and 24% in Q4 2009.

Touch screens reigned supreme in terms of device mix, with the most significant month-over-month increase, or 1.98% overall, representing 48.8% of impressions on Millennial’s network in December.  With touch screens becoming the standard input method for new-age smartphones, Millennial is predicting touch screen-enabled devices to garner well over 50% of ad-impressions by the end of Q1 2010.

In terms of carrier mix, Wi-Fi (carrier independent) was the clear leader, representing 22.56% of network impressions, with Verizon and Sprint taking the number 2 and 3 spots with 18% and 16% respectively.  With mobile data getting all the attention, it’s easy to forget that most mobile users are still utilizing Wi-Fi for their mobile connections- proved by the fact that nearly a quarter of all impressions to Millennial’s network came from Wi-Fi connected devices.

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Want to keep tabs on the White House? There’s an app for that.

The White House has formally unveiled an iPhone/iPod Touch application in a move that will deliver “dynamic content” from WhiteHouse.gov.

Capitalizing on the fact that millions of Americans get their news and information via mobile content on a daily basis, the White House introduced the new app as a means for staying “transparent” and “connected.”

According to the WhiteHouse.gov’s official announcement of the app, “Mobile internet access is an important way Americans are staying informed. Mobile web usage grew over 100% in the last year in the United States and higher worldwide.” Accordingly, the application will provide access to the official White House blog, the latest from the Briefing Room, real time coverage of live White House events, behind-the-scenes photos, and on-demand videos.

Presidential speeches will also be archived in both text and video formats. Next week’s State of the Union speech, for example, will be available via streaming video through the White House app, which is free and now available for download from the iTunes App Store.

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