Is it me, or is there a burst of chatter about mobile advertising recently? I swear we started looking into it as a company before it became the hot topic du jour! Anyway, here’s some more things that have come our way:

First, I’m sure you’ve all seen Russ’ Post about AdMob. That had to come sooner or later. But it’s a good thing – we can certainly use them as an ad source for mobile apps instead of trying to figure out a way to do something like that ourselves, or relying more on subscription models.

Adding to the feasibility of that service is a statistic published in the Jan 16 New York Times:

Thomas J. Burgess, the chief executive of Third Screen, said his customers’ mobile ad budgets had risen from an average of $20,000 for a campaign a year ago to $150,000 to $250,000 today. He said the company had just signed its largest deal ever, a $1.6 million contract for a one-year campaign with an entertainment industry advertiser that he declined to name.

One reason for growing interest in cellphone ads, Mr. Burgess said, is the relatively high rate at which customers click on banner ads on mobile screens. The click-through rate is around 4 percent on phones, compared with 1 percent on the Internet, he said.

4 percent versus 1. That’s huge…. if it’s true. Though if you’re dealing with mobile pages with less content on them, the ad has a higher presence ratio than on the web. Plus, people haven’t programmed themselves to filter them out while reading a mobile page yet.

Last but not least is a post on PhoneScoop regarding video ads on your cellphone. The aim is possibly to reduce your subscription rate by subsidizing with ads. Not a bad thing IMHO as long as it’s not invasive. I don’t want “can you hear me now?” ads popping up in the middle of a call. But oddly enough, I wouldn’t mind Terry Tate doing so.

They also mention wanting to strive towards location-based ads integrating with this. Again, if not invasive, my privacy alarm doesn’t go off at all with this. Though my privacy alarm is a bit liberal for most people – as long as you don’t know when I’m in the bathroom, I’m probably cool with it.

So here we go into the new world of mobile ads. I never thought I’d say it, but I really feel like this is an enabling technology for smaller developers who want to make great applications for mobile devices and still get paid.

But am I the only one? Oliver Starr for one, is livid about it:

Great. Just what we want. Not only are advertisers excited about interrupting us via the most personal communications device we access, but proving that they know exactly where we are at the same time, thus violating our privacy too. What‚’s next? A sample of new ‚papier de toilette‚ while I‚’m in the loo at a restaurant? I can see it now – not only will they be tracking our every move, but street teams will be sent to physically follow the most demographically desirable ‚victims‚ to offer real time sampling of products that coincide with the travels of the poor fellows unlucky enough to be labled ‚PRIME CUSTOMERS‚.

Ouch. Yeah, that’s a totally valid way to look at it if it is executed poorly. I’m sticking to my guns though. Sure you’ll get the unscrupulous ad campaigns that try to be invasive. But customers are carriers’ lifeblood – so they have to keep them happy to a certain degree. All browsers have pop-up blockers now, and carriers will have to put similar safeguards in place to force ads to behave. It will be sorted out – really – I have faith.