In the second in a series of two interviews on mobile web advertising, we speak with Niren Hiro, Vice President, Business Development at AdMob Inc.

SEE ALSO: 40% Rise In CPM In First Half , Need To Educate Market, Increase Net Spends: mKhoj

CS: How do you propose to help increase net spend on mobile?
NH: Let’s start Macro. Out of 3 and a half billion phones, 500 million are already browsing the net. By 2011 there will be 5 billion phones out of which we presume 1.7 billion will be browsing the web. In India, the primary access point for the internet will be the phone. We are pretty alarmed at the percentage of traffic from India. It’s currently at 400 million ad impressions, 10% of our overall (4 billion ad impressions). I remember being in Barcelona and talking to a key executive from one of the bigger telcos in India and he was astonished at the traffic we were pushing. Back then, we had 3500 sites on our network and 200-250 million impressions. Now we have a base of 5000 sites with 400 million. Making access easy is a complex task, it involves infrastructure. Good data access plans, handsets, price points are the macro factors that will help. We are confident of doubling in size here in the next few months and I would be surprised if we didn’t.  We are looking to serve 800 million impressions in the next six-eight months.

CS: How do you see the general trend in On deck vs Off deck properties? Is it sustainable being a pure-play offdeck property for a content provider? 
NH: We made AdMob an open market place where you can buy and sell audiences as you want. In terms of long term trends, what happened with the desktop will repeat itself with the mobile. You can’t be a gatekeeper and lock in traffic. Search will play a critical role to get users to go to other sites. That works in favour of off deck traffic. But the overall size of the pie will grow very fast. Penetration of GPRS in advanced market is 50-60%, the water level will rise. If you are embarking on a business that is purely offdeck, you have a good chance to making it big.

CS: When do you see rates averaging at global standards?
NH: Advertisers want reach, we are at a market leading position on reach. We have 4 ad segments. Downloads, Click 2 Call, Brands and Pure media companies. I think a key component is just educating the market. Also, providing them with a set of tools that allows them to invest in growth (ad mob analytics for example) will help grow the business. Importantly, we need to work closely with our key customers in each of the buckets mentioned above.

CS: How different/similar is India in terms of usage patterns to both China as well as high-yield countries like the US?
NH: The similarities are in the advertiser segments. 80% of our market here consists of the same advertiser segments as those in the other markets. In India, the developer and media community is superbly innovative. The first phase of growth was when a lot of companies drove users from TV to SMS, and now it will be from sms to the mobile internet. We already see companies doing that. In India, I would like to see mobile web and iPhone dev companies start to compete at the world stage and play ball at a global level. Some of the earlier mobile companies like IMI, worked with global carriers and did very well. We have the iPhone dev competition going on. People in India need to realize that they can compete on the world stage.

How does AdMob compete against indigenous mobile ad networks, thoughts on 3G and more after the jump