Ajit over at Open Gardens analyzes the pre-requisites for mobile advertising to succeed. He concludes:

a) Advertising on the Web is expected to take off substantially over the next two years

b) By viewing the Web and the Mobile Web holistically – we could capture some of that new advertising revenue on to mobile devices

c) Specifically, services that are present on the Web can be accessed on mobile devices through subsidization by the ad model – this includes content accessed from RSS feeds, email, IM etc(and I think only the ad model will work for these because people will not pay on the mobile for content which is free on the web)

Can we view the mobile and the web through the same viewfinder? I believe there are some substantial challenges, the primary of which is: your phone display is not a miniature version of your laptop screen. Plus: the use cases for mobile web are different from those for desktop web.

The question shouldn’t be, how do we push advertising to mobile users so that we can deliver them apps for free, but rather, how do we make great apps that users will pay for, and gladly so.

Like they pay for mobile access to their corporate e-mail.

Why pay for mobile Twitter client or mobile Facebook? It’s free on the Web! Anything that can help me right now, right here, when I am out there (be it in the city, on the road, wherever) without my laptop, that’s where the mobile app developers should be headed.