Why we need an Adsense that values relationships

So why don't I have Adsense on my blog? Google keeps pushing it at me. Why don't I take this free money?

The first reason is simple and mercenary. The payment I may receive via Adsense is too low to tempt me. The return on my time not sufficiently rewarding. ( I know, I've tried in the past).

That may be because there are insufficient advertisers for the Adwords related to the stuff I blog about. And that means the ads served seem rather less like the helpful content that Adsense promises and more like the spam it seeks to avoid. (image courtesy)

And I don't want to put you off, dear reader. I value our relationship more than I value a few cents from Google.

A lot more actually, which is where RoI comes in. Or perhaps we should call it RoR - return on reputation and/or relationship?

By allowing advertising which could sell you something I have not tried myself, I can't give it my endorsement.

I can't recommend it to you. In fact an ad may pop up for a product or service I will actively recommend you do not use. Each time this happens our relationship is damaged and my reputation with you is diminished.

Adsense takes no account of the value we both place on this.

I'd like to think the niche nature of this community is such that should I recommend a product, service, event etc you will give it quite serious consideration.

Our conversations can be – and regularly are – one to one. And this is the reality of the future online as more and more we become The Eighth Mass Media - the publishers, advertisers, marketers, distributors, connectors.

You'll give me the time of day because over time you have come to learn from experience that we share the same thirst for knowledge about certain things, have similar problems to solve etc. We are one of my favourite things - a community of purpose.

In short, we have a relationship in which we exchange trust to build reputation.

I described a simple model previously which could value reputation using something like Adsense. It may be worth reviewing again.

I think if a model could be devised and implemented which raised the valuation of reputation and therefore of our recommendations, one to another, it would kill the incumbents.

Who would stick with the few cents of Adsense if instead you had a way of being rewarded for the recommendations you give freely to those you know will value them?

It’s a micro-relationships model, but not a micro-payment one. Car manufacturers have been know to pay up to £300 to large media outfits for a lead which results in a test drive. We as individuals will come to expect equal returns in our niches.

That’s mostly because our recommendations come with our reputations and micro-relationships tightly bundled to them.

We don’t give our recommendations lightly. False recommendations are taken personally. We lose friends. Your recommendations would become ultimately worthless. And we understand that recommendation is in the eye of the perceiver – and we don’t want to lose face by giving friends something they perceive as ill conceived. (Yes, I do think my recommendation to you is more valuable than a recommendation from some form of mass media broadcasting at the lowest common denominator of its audience.)

We know our friends (our communities of purpose) in ways advertisers – even Google – can’t touch.

The future is not in-context, related, targeted. It is in conversational flow (with all the real-time that suggests), peer-to-peer recommendation and consistently and constantly validated reputation - otherwise known as human relationships.

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Google puts 'your' brand up for sale

If the news that the community of users owns your brand is only just sinking in, try this for a
size. Google is now going to allow other people (rivals) to bid on 'your' brand's key words in the UK. Via WebWire
According to the report anyone will be able to bid on trademarked names (just as has been the case in the US since 2004).
There's a bit of a panic being raised over on this story about it. Most of the concern is about how this will add complexity to the seo sales world. My heart bleeds.
What about the poor old consumer - looks to me like this carries the risk of creating yet another hurdle between us and getting the return we actually want.
If I search for Nike I'm not looking for Adidas.

Make this mobile. But will we still talk?

I've just added a new widget at the top left of the blog. 'Make It Mobile'. Click it and you'll have the content from this blog on your phone to take with you where-ever you go. And it'll get updated the moment I update.

The irony of sending it to your communication device is that by doing so you risk disrupting the conversation.

The 'make it mobile' badge is one of the new bits from Mippin. I've been following Mippin's progress - a system which turns rss feeds from fixed line content into mobile sites, since it launched (Mippin plays video from your feed/ Mippin: Satisfying the long tail, extending the reach of the stumpy dog). CEO Scott Beaumont joins the conversation here from time to time.

They are among the best of a crowd of challengers in this space (widsets, squace and a new one on me, kimia)

Today they've updated and the changes make it oh-so-easy to monetize your content.
And as we know from the explosion of the long tail which adsense inspired on the internet, offering an incentive to publish is a key driver for the many millions who will populate the mobile internet.

In this post when I suggested the long tail would impact mobile internet first and fast (and Itsmy.com and Pepperonity are showing the way) I asked for the following to enable that long tail:

1. Really easy creation of mobile pages (on fixed line and on mobile)
2. Really easy ability to change the design to our tastes (and I'm thinking icons/desktop style as well as background colours and layout)
3. Ability to add and create rss feeds
4. Ability to add code snippets (ie YouTube video, google adsense)
5. Really easy share/ creator propogation (ie socially networked)
6. Enabled for social trade.
7. It has to be free to the site owner.
8. Option to offer as an application-based widget.

So how does the latest version of Mippin score?
1. If your fixed line site has a half decent rss feed it couldn't be simpler to mobilize. But you can't make a mippin site or upload content to it from your mobile.
2. The icon and desktop stuff is still illusive - but that's a nightmare to make right for every operator and every mobile, so Mippin, you are forgiven.
3. The rss feeds bit is what drives mippin. They rely on you having a fixed line site already which has them.
4. The youtube video example has now been implemented on Mippin. Add a youtube code to your blog post and it will play on the mobilized verson too. Critically they've made it easy as pie to add admob code, more easily even than admob. Type in your admob id number and mippin does the rest. Need an admob account? The links are there to guide you very swiftly.
5. Easy share stuff - well that awaits critical mass but Mippin is certainly enabled for this.
6. Enabled for social trade. Sadly not (in a mynumo kind of way) but what the hey.
7. Free to the site owner. Yes yes.
8. Widgetised. No. You can't create a widget to share on anyone's phone's 'desktop' or homepage. But there is a widget (now added to this blog) for your fixed line page which makes it a one-click operation for a user to get your content optimised for their phone, on their phone.

So, a round of applause chaps. I'm trying the admob ads on the mobile version, though I don't expect too many to be queueing up to place ads on my content, but I do seek to understand how easy it is to achieve.

One thought/question: Itsmy.com doesn't share revenues with the people who create its content. Their users are inspired enough by two things which make this possible:

1. The owner of the UGC (publisher) gets to control whether or not they have ads of any kind on their content. If they do choose to have ads then they can also select what kind (as referred to in my posts about Mobile Internet in Berlin earlier this week) and in this respect the user begins to think of the ads as content - not as an unwelcome interruption.
I'm hoping that they get to select at a quite granular level ie which brands, even which exact ads. I need to revist Itsmy.com to confirm. Perhaps a more regular user can tell me?

The right brands on your content allows you to show the world what kind of person you are.
It's a nice reversal of the usual routine in which brand owners decide who or what to associate their brand with through where they choose to advertise. In this model the user gets to select which brands WE wish to be associated with.

Is this another example of the intention economy? Trust me? trust my brands!
Since most users in the Itsmy environment are likley to trust their peers more than a brand in the first place, this could prove very powerful.

2. Only content created on a mobile is allowed on itsmy. That means a) it's all guaranteed to be the users own (written, shot, or filmed on their phone) and b) it all comes from the point-of-inspiration device that is your mobile. The result is users share the content they create very rapidly - and upload lots of it, creating loads of advertising opportunities as they go. Being able to publish at the point they are inspired becomes a driver in and of itself, as CEO Antonio Vince Staybl discussed in Berlin.

Mippin speaks to a need. The need to extend reach into the mobile space for anyone who is creating their content on fixed line.

Itsmy speaks to the need of those who are inspired to create, publish and share as they live their life, where ever they are and what ever they are doing (data charges allowing!).

In theory of course, if you use something like shozu to add content to your blog... and your blog feeds into your mippsite, then you can share at point of inspiration, too. Bit of a stretch though?

Wonder if you can turn an itsmy site into a Mippin one? Would that make for an unholy mess or a double whammy?

I suspect the former for a relatively simple reason. Mippin is a broadcast model. Itsmy is a networked one.

No matter how much of my rss feed is published, the one thing you can't do via mippin is add a comment to the original blog post, or even on the version of it that appears on mippin.
You can vote on my Mippsite in its entirety, you can send a link to a particular post by email. You can twitter it. You can share it on facebook. And these are all very socially enabling, all about sharing after all.
But in each case in order to join the conversation I must send the user away AND hope they are also a member of the community in which we could actually have the conversation. And in this respect the model misses out on the creation-at-the-point-of-inspiration power of the mobile AND the exponential growth potential of connecting up the nodes.

This has to inhibit its fit with the networked world.

This is not necessarily a criticism. And if it is, it is certainly one which can also be levelled at Mippins RSS-fed rivals. Mippin is, after all, an attempt to mobilize the broadcast, publish-from-the-centre, world. The fact that it turns the humble blogger into a broadcaster too is perhaps just a casualty of this.

So, for the record, if you do read one of my blogposts on mippin, please try to keep your inspiration burning long enough to get to a fixed line or full internet version of the blog and join in the conversation then. Send yourself a text reminder or email alert (hey Scott - add that as a button!)

Death of the URL... and a fairer distribution of ad dollars

I spoke at the TUC yesterday. That's not something I blog every day.

To clarify, I was speaking at NetImperative's Online Publishing Sector Seminar which was held at the Trade Union Congress in Great Russell Street.

It was a good session with some great fellow panellists. My bit was about the impact of social networks (what isn't impacted by social networks?).

Two sessions struck me as being particularly relevant to the discussions on this blog.

Ivan Pope, widget authority and founder of Snipperoo dropped the 'death of the url' bombshell.
The conclusion is no suprise to anyone who has followed the rise of the widget - from google's adsense and Youtube code snippets, to rss readers and beyond.

Widgets are the reaggregation of disaggregation - and this time it's on the terms of the user.

Indeed, I offered this take on the subject on my blog in February this year: Services and the death of the website

Ivan has been kind enough to invite me to the Widgety Goodness conference he's hosting on December 6 in Brighton, so I'm hoping we'll have an opportunity to discuss this further, then.

The second idea I took away with me came from Mike Teasdale - planning director at Harvest.

Mike made a plea for a bit more fairness in the distribution of advertising spend. The story goes that google (and their ilk) gets the lions share of the CPA (cost per acquisition) cake because the final click is most often from search.

Mike argues that isn't fair - because it's not giving enough value back to the creators of the demand. You don't go searching for something you don't already want. Content creators/hosts are doing the job of creating desire.

Example: User sees an in context and related banner ad. What we do next is... very often not click it. This may well be because we feel interrupted, irritated or whatever. This doesn't much matter to Mike's case. What does, is that the ad has planted an idea in the user's mind. It may have seeded the demand and it has been displayed in a context in which the user was susceptible to that demand.

So there is no click-thru record of me 'responding'. But I do actually respond to it and I am more prepared to part with cash as a result.

More often than not I'll do a search around the terms the combination of ad and content has planted in my mind and do this because I want to do some comparisons - and perhaps because I don't trust one single ad when I can go comparing and do some consideration with communities I trust.

But despite all that - the combination of content and ad has had a large influence on a deal getting done.

I suppose one simple way of redistributing the value more fairly would be to increase the value placed on ad impressions served.

But to achieve this will need some serious client re-education. Perhaps this story should be in the toolkit of anyone selling targeting advertising on their own web properties - against the rising adsense tsunami.

Facebook's SocialAds: How they should work - but probably won't

The blogosphere is a-buzz with the rumour that Facebook's 'SocialAds' will be announced at New York's ad:tech conference on November 6.

This is the long-awaited out-google-adsensing proposal that makes Facebook worth that multi-billion price tag - allegedly.

Interesting that google is fighting back with its new OpenSocial to kick Facebook where it hurts.

Between them, you have to hope that someone is about to crack the 'how to make money out of social networks' conundrum.

There are plenty of guesses about how SocialAds might play: This from TechCrunch...

"It will be how Facebook will actually start to make real money—both through ads on its own site and on other sites through a new ad network... (presumably with its ad partner and new investor Microsoft). SocialAds will be an attempt to be like Google’s AdSense, except that it will allow ads to be targeted to Facebook members’ individual interests and profile data rather than the text on a given Web page. This targeting will be done by placing cookies on Facebook members’ browsers when they visit the social site, so that they can be identified later when they visit other sites hosting SocialAds."

I hope there is more to it than that. Adsense isn't just contextual - it's real time too. At the time I'm interested in content (as revealed by the fact I'm viewing it right now) about X, I get served ads about X.

If, as a result of knowing from my social comms that I'm interested in X, the net effect is the same. And if I'm served that ad long after I've left the content that relates to X, isn't it just in-my-face spam when it hurls itself at me when I'm viewing content on other un-related sites?

I'm guessing Facebook have worked that much out.

So what are the possibilities?

Isn’t the truly imaginative solution to try to work out what advertising/marketing looks like in a networked world?

Talk of ad networks, targeting to personal interest and data, it’s all very web2.0, but is it addressing the fundamentals of change here?

We have a generation of collaborators, with a network to collaborate on (the internet) and an economic infrastructure which makes out-sourcing, the means to produce, cheap and easy to find and do. The perfect storm that wikinomics refers to is upon us.

We accept that this has and will continue to disrupt the way content is created. It’s why social networks of the Facebook variety have succeeded while old-style broadcast sites stare wide-eyed at their Reed’s-Law-driven exponential growth.

And it’s dawning that the same disruption is happening to the way in which products and services are created (co-created). It's graphically illustrated in the information industry by Linux, for example.

And yet the predicted response from the cutting edge is, more ads, pretty much like the old ones, but better targeted to the individual's social data.

Haven’t we missed a (the) point here?

If a community is involved in the co-creation of the products and services it has decided it needs to call into existence, this has two key impacts.

1. It has the potential to be a perfect fit. The people who’ve been involved in the co-creation of the product or service that results will love it and 'buy' it (that which we create we embrace, as Alan Moore likes to say). They will also rave about it – marketing it to other like-minded people, attracting more with the same passion/purpose to join their niche global community of collaborators.
2. Doesn’t co-creation of this kind imply a perfect fit between supply and demand? What's the need for traditional ads. The community does its own marketing - and it's powerfully peer-to-peer and with all the ramped-up trust that implies.
   

Is this the end of capitalism? We only create what we need. So who needs someone else making something I don't need and then trying to sell it to me. Skills get matched to product production on a global scale - cheaply and more efficiently than ever before.

And if it is the end of the mass industrial model full stop, must it also be the end of advertising?

As I wrote once before: "How do you sell a mass produced one-size-fits-all product to people who want their content disaggregated and delivered to them exactly where they want it, when they want it, and honed to the interests they self-select and/or navigate to/discover through trusted communities?
"One answer might be to tailor the advert to the segmented user group. Take a look at realtimecontent.com for a vision of this.
"It's a brave attempt to solve a difficult problem. But I'm not comfortable with it. I wasn't sure why before. Now I think I am - it doesn't address the fundamental miss-match here - that we're trying to sell the same mass produced product to different people by effectively pretending (spinning that) it's a different product.
"It ain't, it can't be and it won't be until you let the community of shared interest take a stake in the creative process. "

However, the problem is, there are still things we need which we can't ALL participate in the creation of.

I need medicine. But I'm not passionate about taking part in making it. How do I get my medicine? I could contribute something to the process I suppose (can you make it taste nice? can you change the colour, I thinkthere's a need for a non-stain version etc etc). But can I contribute something of real value to the process of production (co-creation) of every good and service and public utility I'll ever need? Time would seem to be a barrier, if nothing else.

It feels like common sense to say no. So I'll still need to offer something in exchange for my medicine. Cash/Capital works pretty well as the representation of this. So capitalism gets to roll on.

And for the matching of supply to demand in those cases, we'll still need some form of connecting agency (marketing of some form or another). So if we can get ads working in a much more engaged way - more like content we want, like and trust - through the use of powerful social data analytics - then it has to be better than the interruptive models we see struggling all around us. Perhaps get some recommendation and rating from members of communities involved.

We see some giant leaps toward this with Blyk. Perhaps we'll see a further taste of it with SocialAds.

But wouldn’t it be wild if SocialAds really do what the name suggests: they simply act as the way in which you are recruited to join co-creating communities through a system of brilliantly executed, real time, taste and recommendation engines.

Now that, I would stand up and applaud.

Mippin: Satisfying the long tail - extending the reach of the stumpy dog

Some time ago I asked for the moon on a stick.

Today I saw something which might not offer the entire lunar body, but I think it gets us into orbit. Mippin is in beta right now. Next week it'll be shown in public and go into public beta.

I was lucky enough to get a pre-preview preview, if you like - and VP, product management, Prashant Agarwal is happy for me to share. So go check it out for yourself.

It's the latest thing from Refresh Mobile - the former T-mobile management buy-out team which previously gave us Mobizines.

And it ticks a lot of the boxes from my moon-on-a-stick list.

As I said once before ...the fixed line net was initially grown by content providers of the mass industrial age, the mobile web will explode as a direct result of User Generated Content.
And because of the social nature of 2.0 I expect the growth to be exponential - and to dominate the way the mobile web develops in a faster and more pervasive way than we saw with the original fixed-line internet.
The long tail will wag the mobile internet dog more vigorously than it has the fixed line internet."

And I identified these drivers for the long tail to go truly exponential.

1. Really easy creation of mobile pages (on fixed line and on mobile)
2. Really easy ability to change the design to our tastes (and I'm thinking icons/desktop style as well as background colours and layout)
3. Ability to add and create rss feeds
4. Ability to add code snippets (ie YouTube video, google adsense)
5. Really easy share/ creator propogation (ie socially networked)
6. Enabled for social trade.
7. It has to be free to the site owner.
8. Option to offer as an application-based widget.

Mippin gets a long way along the route. It's really easy to create mobile pages (from rss feeds from your current content - your blog for example, or your website, if you are a publisher). So it also ticks number 3 on the list. FasterFuture is, of course, already available on it!

There are both sharing and rating functions (5) and community scoring edits the 'hits' you find on your portal home page.

Critically it integrates with ad services such as admob (or at least it will very soon) which allows the UGC creator to benefit from their efforts. The ability to monetise long-tail content was a huge driver for the explosion of the fixed web (eg google adsense, the most powerful widget yet!)

Mippin is free (that's no7) and there are plenty of widget plans (they've even got a bit of an in with facebook... watch that space).

This is Widsets on steroids. Where Widsets doesn't allow you to make cash from your rss feed in, the admob integration (Screen Tonic for bigger publishers if you prefer) means you benefit from your labouts.

And powerfully, while you have to download a client to your phone to make Widsets work, there's no need for this with Mippin.

How do they make their cash? Ads on the aggregated elements (users create their own portal of content they want to have fed to them, they get to rate it and share it too (though the share via sms function is too clunky at the moment - but it is early days).

There are no ads on the publisher's content - other than the ones the publisher selects AND which that publisher is earning cash from. This trumps the peperonity model, for example.
They take no revenue share from your arrangement with Admob, google adsense or whoever, either. They expect to make money from their introduction of your content to the likes of Admob. Which seems fine and reasonable to me.

In a nutshell, what Mippin does is allow individuals to create their own mobile portals of content they care about and rate and share that content.

Their marketing plan involves mobile ad campaigns of their own. It remains to be seen how effectively they can position themselves as your first-choice mobile portal.

The publisher (be it users creating their own mobile sites from their blog feeds etc, or publishers of bigger websites seeking to move into the mobile space) are simply extending their reach.

We shouldn't confuse Mippin with something which allows the creation of mobile-focused services fitting the 6Ms of mobile to perfection - as described by Tomi Ahonen (and those who attended Mobinar will be clear on these).

It also doesn't carry links from the original content, nor videos (though it does manage images from the rss feeds.)

What it does do is radically simplify the process of extending reach into mobile - and monetising it.

To publishers, I do not recommend Mippin as your long term mobile strategy - but it does seem an ideal quick fix to get you on the road and to use as part of your strategy. Create new mobile services alongside this - but perhaps use this to extend your reach and make a little revenue - free.

To those who are about to create the long tail - this is going to help a whole lot of shaking happen faster.

The ad battle moves to mobile - but maybe they are drawing the wrong lines?

One of the most critical business battles of the early 21st century is raging - for dominance of the mobile advertising market.

Google has lit the blue-touch paper on adwords for mobile and just days later Nokia announces it is buying Enpocket

Nokia says: "Enpocket is a global leader in mobile advertising; providing technology and services that allow brands to plan, create, execute, measure and optimize mobile advertising campaigns around the world.

"By acquiring Enpocket, Nokia will accelerate the scaling of its mobile advertising business, leveraging Enpocket's platform and strong partnerships with advertisers, publishers and operators. In addition to key assets, through this transaction Nokia is gaining a team with strong expertise in global mobile advertising across disciplines."

Big guns - and all blazing.

Looks like the big fish are starting to snap up the clever ones.

Wonder what it all means for Admob?

I also wonder how strategic these decisions are - and how tactical.

For me, the forms of mobile advertising we've seen so far are of the kind Tomi Ahonen would characterise as 6th mass media plays on the 7th mass media. That is the kind of ad styles/inventories are pretty much like internet ones, squeezed on to mobile internet - with less cookie-driven relevance. (see Mobile as the 7th Mass Media, top of page). Which take advantage of what makes mobile different?

No one has gone (alan moore's) engagement marketing route, though I suspect Blyk will get closest of all when it launches before the end of this month.

Expect a lot of eyes pointing in Blyk's direction. And a lot of people wishing they were under 24...

Microsoft buys ScreenTonic, Yahoo launches onesearch

A couple of fairly heavyweight mobile internet moments happened today, and this post is simply to log them.
Microsoft has bought ScreenTonic, the Paris-based mobile-internet advertising company. The firm felt it missed out on the disruption opportunity of the fixed-line internet (hello adsense!) and is 'positioning itself better' for this second internet disruption.
It'll be interesting to see how much they paid.
The second biggy today is Yahoo's launch of OneSearch - a locally biased mobile-focused search. It claims to be radical and new. Not sure how different it is to google's mobile search?

Nokia launches google adsense-style offering for mobile

Wow, now this is interesting if you're a media company (creating content) or an advertiser. Nokia has launched a global ad service. http://www.adservice.nokia.com/news_index.jsp

It smells a lot to me like a google adsense for mobile.

And I quote from the Nokia blurb: "Nokia today announced two mobile advertising services. Nokia Ad Service, is a fully managed service for advertisers to conduct targeted advertising on mobile services and applications. Nokia Ad Service consists of a group of mobile publishers forming a mobile ad network and a platform to deploy, manage and optimize mobile advertising campaigns. Nokia also introduced Nokia Advertising Gateway, a private label service for third party Publishers and Advertising Aggregators that want to extend to relevant mobile advertising. Nokia Advertising Gateway operates as an intelligent switch, selecting between text, visual, audio and video ads - depending on the user’s context – and feeding the ad to the device. "

Ajit Joaker believes this is an extremely significant moment. Read his take here.
Alan Moore at Communites Dominate Brands has this to say.

Publishers are offered (from Nokia site):

• Our mobile ad server delivers sophisticated campaigns. Publishers can capitalize on the following:
• Categorization in Nokia ad network to receive relevant ads
• Flexible setup of any mobile publishing service
• New source of ad revenue without deploying ad sales and operations
• Full technical support to help with implementation
• Detailed user profile while respecting users' privacy
• Users' data is secure, protected and maintained in our ad platform

The implementation of the service is a 3-step-process:

Step 1: create the order form to outline different formats of advertising,

Step 2: receive ad tags from Nokia Ad Service and place them in the desired location throughout your mobile internet service,

Step 3: access full reports 24 hours a day. Metrics are available on a flexible set of cross relational rules.

This is all based on the theory that there are loads of Nokias out there to serve ads too - they are as much a network globally as the internet is. But if google comes up with something similar, surely the reach will be greater?

A little further reading of the Nokia site reveals: "Nokia Ad Service provides a worldwide reach to advertisers through its network. Nokia.mobi, one of the largest mobile portals with over 100 million monthly visits in 120 countries, has already joined the network."

I don't know about you, but I've never accessed Nokia.mobi. Perhaps its pushed more to users on handsets outside the UK? In any event divide 100m by 120 and that ain't that many users per nation per month. But I guess this is just the start of the network?

What the Nokia plan does have is that it isn't mobile-internet dependant (google adsense for mobile has to be). Nokia will serve ads against content dependant on the way that content is being seen - on a text only page, or video where that's appropriate.

I'm fascinated to try to understand the detail - do Nokia phone owners have to opt in, can they select preferences? I've got a Nokia and no-one has told me what to expect...

Whatever the case, just as everyone expected mobile advertising to be a rich picking for content providers and operators this year, along comes a supreme piece of disruption.

Think what google adsense did for internet advertising and to traditional media.

Think what it did for the drive to generate content on the internet platform too.

Then you get a sense of why the likes of Alan and Ajit are raving.

Youtube on your mobile?

YouTube CEO Chad Hurley has said that they hope to "Have something on a mobile device within the next year".
Whether or not they do a carrier deal, or use a WAP site, the fact that Google have just started offering GMail on mobile, and could now add a limitless supply of comedy videos means that you've only got until they sort the current copyright problems to get any video content mobile services up and running, or it'll be too late...

http://gigaom.com/2006/11/02/youtube-mobile/