Mobile internet usage and useful mobile ads

Last December, those of you who responded to our 100th mobile blog post said that you wanted more editorial content and mobile industry insight. Here are a couple of recent mobile-related articles that you might find interesting from Google executives.

The first article went out yesterday on TechCrunch from Vic Gundotra, our VP of engineering for Google's mobile and developer products. Vic talks about the nature and prerequisites of surging mobile internet usage. Straight-forward and flat-rate data plans, modern mobile web browsers, and easy access to mobile apps -- that's what you want, right? This chart, for instance, compares mobile search traffic from one carrier (MetroPCS) that offers a simple, flat-rate data plan with a larger carrier that does not offer a comparable plan.

The second article was published today on MediaPost from Doug Garland, our VP of product management for mobile advertising. Doug offers suggestions on how to make mobile advertising work and describes the benefits of experimenting with new opportunities.

As always, feel free to leave questions and comments below or in our forum.

Posted by Lawrence Chang, Product Marketing Manager, Google mobile team

This is a test -- ads on YouTube's mobile site

Over the past year, we’ve focused on creating and delivering a full-featured YouTube mobile user experience. We think we've made great strides in doing this, allowing you to access YouTube wherever you are, whenever you want it. YouTube for mobile continues to grow exponentially, and today, people watch hundreds of millions of YouTube videos every month on mobile devices.

You may have noticed that we started running a test of display ads on select pages of the YouTube mobile site in the U.S. and Japan. This is our first step in testing mobile advertising for YouTube -- it will give you a new way to interact with content on the go, while allowing us to learn how video viewers engage with mobile advertising. Our test advertisers will also have an additional branding tool at their disposal and the opportunity to reach the millions of people who visit YouTube every day on their phones.

At YouTube, we are constantly testing new ways to deliver the kinds of ads that contribute to the user experience while making the most sense for advertisers, and we've learned a lot about what works for YouTube and what doesn't. We're excited to explore new approaches to mobile advertising, and will evaluate this test closely over the next several weeks to make sure we provide our community, our partners and advertisers with the most valuable and effective mobile experience possible.

Posted by Christine Tsai, Product Marketing Manager, YouTube