LONDON, UK: Mobile phone operators in Britain have teamed up with digital market research firm comScore to measure mobile Internet usage in the first exercise of its kind, which they hope will jump start the mobile advertising market.

Advertisers are keen to target consumers via mobile phones, which have the advantage of being both highly personal and location-aware, but have been held back by factors including a lack of hard data about mobile media consumption.

According to IT researcher Gartner, global mobile advertising revenues likely reached about $530 million last year, and could jump to $13.5 billion by 2013.

Mobile operators own key data about how their customers use phones, but until now have been reluctant to exploit that knowledge for fear of raising privacy concerns.

"We got together a coalition of the willing and we said 'Let's try something,'" said Henry Stevens, who is responsible for mobile advertising at telecoms industry body the GSM Association (GSMA), at the launch of Mobile Media Metrics.

Stevens said it took almost three years of talking to get the project off the ground, but eventually Britain's five mobile operators agreed to provide anonymised Internet usage data to create the new product.

He said the GSMA hoped to repeat the exercise in other markets after Britain, which was chosen for its market size and relatively mature stage of development.

The data from Telefonica's O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and 3UK showed that 16 million people in the UK accessed the Internet from their mobile phone in December.

They viewed a total of 6.7 billion pages and spent 4.8 billion minutes online.

The top sites visited were Facebook.com, Google sites and Telefonica sites -- with comparable numbers of visitors -- but in terms of page views and minutes spent on the site, Facebook was far and away the most popular.

Starting point

Media buyers said transparent measurement would make it possible to plan mobile advertising campaigns and gauge their success in the same way that they do for other media.

"Basic audience metrics are the starting point," said Bob Wootton, director of marketing and advertising at British advertising industry association the ISBA, at the launch of the new product late on Thursday.

Currently, about three-quarters of mobile advertising spending comes from sellers of mobile content such as music, games, ringtones or wallpaper, according to Nick Lane, chief analyst at research firm mobileSquared.

"The big brands need to start coming in and spending money," he said.

It is unclear, however, whether mobile operators -- who have failed to profit significantly from the distribution of music, video or data over their increasingly crowded networks -- will benefit from a lift to the mobile advertising market.

Rory Sutherland, UK vice-chairman of advertising agency Ogilvy, said there was a danger carriers would find themselves once again acting as "dumb pipes", as in the case of video.

"The benefits fall quite markedly to consumers, who enjoy many new ways of watching television, the money falls to content owners or advertisers or platform owners or the people who do the billing," he told Reuters.

"But then the costs of transmission fall to the actual network owner ... which may then find itself faced with an enormous bill for upgrading the network."