Forecasters Juniper Research think that mobile tv will take the largest share of mobile ad expenditure by 2010. Total mobile adspend will pass the $1 billion mark this year and climb to almost $7.6bn by 2013.

There’s no reason to disagree. Increases in bandwidth makes the rise in revenues for mobile tv inevitable. Couple it with the unique targeting opportunities mobile has and you have a goldmine.

Before this happens, Juniper thinks idle-screen advertising will hold court, with revenues moving from $7m in 2008 to over $500m in 2013.

Report author Dr Windsor Holden tells us:

“While adspend in the mobile environment is still extremely limited when compared to the budgets allocated to media such as magazines, television, cinema and the Internet, the opportunities it offers -personalized advertising with very high response rates, delivered to a device which is always in close proximity to the individual - will make it an increasingly attractive proposition for leading brands.”

Juniper also thinks that advertisers will hold back until issues like poor inventory, reach and common metrics are addressed by operators and content providers. That may be so, but the time to experiment with this stuff is now.

Mobile Visions has released a free beta of their Mobilytics analysis package. The company reckons that traditional web analysis tools are just not right for the mobile environment. There’s so much that doesn’t work on the platform that it needs its own special approach. So they built their own system from scratch. It provides all you’d expect from a web analytics package, plus detail on mobile phone manufacturers, models and specific handset capabilities.

Greg Harris, CEO of Mobile Visions, tells us:

“If a mobile site owner wants to know what percentage of their visitors support streaming video, Mobilytics can tell them. More importantly, Mobilytics can show you exactly where your advertising dollar is going. Are you paying for ads that are clicked on by search engine crawlers? Are they desktop pc users? Mobilytics can answer all this and more.”

Web site owners using the free version of Mobilytics have to join the Mobilytics Ad Network. A small text ad is shown to their visitors. In return, the publisher gets the full suite of analytic tracking tools and a share of ad revenue generated by their site.

On the advertiser side of the fence, the Mobilytics Campaign Tracker follows mobile ad campaigns, goals, revenue and ROI for those investing their marketing budgets in the medium.

Having just thrown out the grand Project Apollo single source trials, Nielsen immediately announced a study on screen media consumption. 450 consumers are going to have their media usage tracked very carefully in two waves this year. Nielsen employees will literally follow these panel members around in Philadelphia, Seattle, Dallas, Atlanta and Chicago. Presumably because they can’t be trusted to fill in their own diaries. Has media measurement really come to this?

The $3.5 million venture is being done together with the US Committee for Research Excellence which is an independent forum created by Nielsen and is a grouping of agencies, media and clients. Nielsen staff will literally following panel members around all day. From waking up in the morning until closing the bedroom door, the panel members will be tracked every 10 seconds and watched with all their media consumption habits logged onto handheld computers.

Paul Donato, Chief Research Officer for The Nielsen Company, tells us:

“In a world where people increasingly watch programming online, on mobile devices and outside the home, this study will help us better understand how people are changing the way they consume media so that we can make informed decisions on how to measure it.”

The whole excercise is focused on screen use, whether it’s tv, computer screens, digital billboards or mobile phones or anything else that’s a screen. Panel members will also get the chance to buy new media gadgets cheaply. Nielsen reckons that this will help them predict future consumption patterns, particularly drops in tv audiences.