While recent media coverage has hyped the potential for advertising on the mobile internet, there remains little standard usage data available with which brands can make informed decisions.

Almost no mobile content owners are currently divulging their usage rates. This makes it very difficult for content owners themselves to benchmark their usage rates, let alone brands deciding where best to advertise.

This situation exists despite a genuine boom in mobile advertising. At Flirtomatic, we’re currently seeing an acceleration in mobile registration against that on PC. What’s more, Flirtomatic received 110 million WAP impressions in October 07. This compares very favourably to the web, however, it is currently nigh on impossible to discover how genuinely impressive numbers are because we can’t compare them with those of any other mobile content owners.

The Mobile Data Association currently releases monthly figures on the overall number of people using WAP, but there is no consistent measurement of specific usage rates. Many mobile content owners are simply unwilling to release statistics.

We are, of course, very excited to have generated such high engagement with Flirtomatic, both measured by half a million registrations and the very high mobile page view levels. For us and other companies trying to build the case for mobile advertising it’s now crucial to buttress early success with industry benchmarking. The mobile web still has further to go to reach the required level. Mobile content owners must begin to become more transparent with regard to usage rates, in order to engage the advertisers and major brands now actively showing interest in the mobile web.