This kind of mobile advertising is referred to as "push" advertising. There's another kind of mobile advertising that's WAP-based, which is "pull" advertising. By its very nature, it cannot be spam because it appears only when the subscriber goes to a mobile site.

While mobile "push" ads are common in this part of the world — who among us has not received spam SMS? — mobile "pull" ads are something new. There are just not that many local WAP sites around and telco WAP portals seldom carry ads. So, few people have experienced these kinds of ads.

The industry refers to such ads as mobile display ads. Google calls them mobile image ads. Perhaps, the most accurate description is WAP banner ads. But whatever you call them, they look to be the future of mobile advertising as more and more WAP sites emerge.

Over in the US and the UK, AdMob is a key mobile ad player. In China, there's a mobile ad outfit called MadHouse. A little closer to home, in Singapore, there's one called Buzz­City, which is really quite impressive.

When you're doing business in Blue Ocean territory, you have to play a role in almost every aspect of the value chain. For BuzzCity, that means creating a mobile social networking site, enabling mobile commerce and having a sophisticated mobile ad serving business.

BuzzCity helps mobile content publishers monetise their traffic through mobile display ads much like how AdMob does it, but with more options. AdMob sells ads purely on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, which means the advertiser only pays when someone clicks on the ad. BuzzCity offers that but it also sells ads based on cost-per-thousand impressions (CPM).

Some advertisers prefer CPC because you pay based on performance but there are also advertisers who don't care about click-through rates because what they are trying to achieve is branding. So, as long as the user sees the ad, that's good enough. Naturally, click-based ads cost more per unit than impression-based ads, which are so cheap that they are measured in batches of 1,000.

When a mobile content publisher signs up with BuzzCity, it receives a set of codes to paste onto the WAP pages where it wants the banner ads to appear. The publisher will be able to view campaign statistics, select advertiser categories and track the revenue generated.

BuzzCity has also come up with an easy-to-use ad system for advertisers to buy and manage ads on its network of WAP sites. The system allows advertisers to define single or multiple campaigns; select start and end dates; manage daily ad spend; select country (or countries) the ads are to appear; target for models and capabilities of handsets; and select channels (types of content) where the ads will be shown.

It also offers special functionalities such as the ability to click through to the advertisers' own WAP sites, Click-To-Call capability and opt-in surveys. The system allows the advertisers to bid for the price they are willing to pay for the clicks. There is, however, a minimum price of one US cent per click. The higher the bid, the more frequent the ads appear.

There are two significant factors that set BuzzCity apart from its competitors. First, it has its own social networking site called MyGamma, which recently won the Best Mobile Social Networking Service award at the 2008 Mobile World Congress.
MyGamma is targeted at two distinct audiences: the newly connected middle class in developing markets and the blue-collar group in developed regions. The rationale is that these "unwired" consumers' main point of access for the Internet will be through their phones rather than through a PC. By building its own mobile social networking site, BuzzCity has its own content channel to sell ads.

Second, BuzzCity gives mobile publishers the option of charging for their content rather than relying just on display ads for revenue. Examples of premium content that can be charged for are ringtones, games, wallpapers, horoscopes, fortune telling, video clips, MP3 songs and passes to premium information.

In this part of the world, premium content providers find it hard enough getting the necessary infrastructure to sell their stuff online. Imagine how much harder it is to do so on mobile. BuzzCity makes it easy by offering a simple payment interface based on its own currency called Gamma Dollars. Mobile merchants who sign up with this programme will be able to offer premium content for sale to users.

First-time users of this mobile commerce system are required to register for a free Gamma Wallet, which they can load with Gamma Dollars via credit card, WAP payment (offered through local telcos) and premium SMS.

If you are a mobile publisher and you want to monetise your site, you would do well to look at BuzzCity as a means to do so.

Beattie certainly thinks so. It's hard to blame him. A former mobile evangelist, Beattie has been working hard on this project for over a year.

"Mowser is at the end of its life in its current form," he wrote. "We haven't been able to raise funding, and as a site, growth has been flat or falling for the past couple months… this is after a year of working on it - so with money and options having run out, it's time to move on."

The site, www.mowser.com, which is accessible by web and mobile web, is still live and it'll be kept running for some time although Beattie warns users to "not rely on the service as it could disappear in the future".

With mobile being such a hot sector, one would think it shouldn't be too hard to find additional funding for the venture. However, Beattie has decided to call it a day, saying  "I don't actually believe in the 'Mobile Web' anymore, and therefore am less inclined to spend time and effort in a market I think is limited at best, and dying at worst."

He adds: "Two years ago I was convinced that the mobile web would continue to evolve in the West to mimic what was happening in countries like Japan and (South) Korea, but it hasn't happened, and now I'm sure it isn't going to.

In other words, I think anyone currently developing sites using xHTML-MP markup, no Javascript, geared towards cellular connections and two inch screens are simply wasting their time, and I'm tired of wasting my time."

In the final analysis, the traffic just wasn't there. "It's not there now, and it won't be," he concludes.

That's a pretty dire prediction which I totally disagree with.

It's important to fully understand what Mowser was. It's basically a browser that does what is referred to as "content adaptation" for mobile phones. What that means is if you access the New York Times through Mowser, you will get a version that has been automatically adapted to the small screen.

Try it. You'll see that while it gives you a passable version of New York Times, it's not as good as New York Times mobile edition (mobile.nytimes.com). Automated content adaptation can never be as good as a custom-built mobile site designed (by a human being, not a machine) specifically for the small screen.

Beattie notes that the standard argument in favour of mobile web is that there are three billion mobile phones out there, far more than the number of PCs in existence. The problem, he says, is that "these billions of users haven't gotten on the Internet."

It's true. They haven't – for a variety of reasons. For one thing, in many parts of the world mobile Internet access is still neither widely available nor cheap. Of course in time this will change. Another reason – and this is a big one – is that visiting the World Wide Web on the phone is a horrible experience even if you are using a content adaptation browser or service.

In order for the user experience to be good, the mobile websites (also known as WAP sites) have to be specifically designed with the small screen in mind. And that involves much more than just shrinking everything down to size. Thought has to be given to usability and user experience issues, as well as what to leave in and what to leave out.

Quite a handful of people have suggested that mobile websites will become redundant once iPhones and its competitors flood the market because on the iPhone, you can go straight to the World Wide Web.

Yes you can but have you tried it? I have. The experience is still lousy and that's because as big as the iPhone screen is, and as slick as its expandable browser may be, full-blown websites are meant to be viewed on a PC screen.

Notice how some websites in the US are now offering "iPhone versions". These are custom-made versions of their sites designed specifically to fit the iPhone. Why would anyone bother to create an iPhone version, if viewing a the regular web version is a good experience on the iPhone?

Beattie says that the mobile web won't happen until there are "better devices" and "full browsers." No doubt, having better devices always helps but having a full browser for a tiny screen is not the solution. The creation of mobile-optimized sites is.

People often look to Japan as success stories for mobile web. Well guess what, those iMode sites that everyone talks about are not websites automatically adapted for the mobile screen. They are custom built sites designed specifically for the mobile screen!

Google, the biggest online advertising player in the world, has just launched Mobile Image Ads. These are banner ads for websites specifically created for the mobile screen. That Google is fast moving into this nascent sector is the strongest indication yet that far from being dead, the mobile web is actually just beginning.