Mobile ad marketplace AdMob has revealed that it has served 1 billion mobile web ads in the past six months, compared to just 30 million in the previous six months.
Founded in early 2006, AdMob enables advertisers to reach their customers on the mobile web and allows publishers to monetise traffic on their mobile sites. Backed by real-time metrics and reporting, advertisers can reach out to users across a set of mobile content channels, including news, entertainment, mobile communities and mobile portals.
The encouraging data point for the mobile web is not just the number of ads being served, but the pace at which things are growing, says AdMob Founder and CEO, Omar Hamoui. In our first six months, we only served about thirty million ads, and over the following six months we served one billion more.
In early analysis of its mobile web page traffic, the company has picked out some  interesting and sometimes surprising trends. The US proved to be the networks largest contributor of mobile web traffic, with South Africa, surprisingly, as the second largest source of mobile web users across AdMobs publisher base. The UK came in fourth place, with a 12% share of the mobile web traffic on the AdMob network. Across the AdMob network the top five countries in terms of traffic are:
1. US: 20% (90m pageviews/month)
2. South Africa: 15% (66m pageviews/month)
3. India: 13% (57m pageviews/month)
4. UK:  12% (53m pageviews/month)
5. Romania:  5% (22m million pageviews/month)

The publishers in AdMobs network have been categorised into five primary content channels.  Of the five channels, Communities and Downloads far outweigh Portals, News and Information, and Entertainment in terms of traffic. The traffic breakdown by channel is:
1. Communities: 45 %
2. Downloads: 44%
3. Portals : 8%
4. Entertainment: 2%
5. News and Information: 1%

AdMob has also revealed a breakdown of the relative proportion of devices that access the mobile web. Nokia leads the pack with a commanding 4% share of devices accessing mobile sites on the AdMob network.
The top five manufacturers across the AdMob network are:
1. Nokia: 41%
2. Motorola: 14%
3. Sony-Ericsson: 13%
4. Samsung: 12%
5. LG: 3%

The mobile advertising industry really needs more transparency, as well as accurate and actionable data says Hamoui, For the first time, we really feel that we have sufficient scale to develop some insight on the usage of the mobile web and were determined to invest more time sharing this knowledge to help spur the growth of the industry as a whole.