Traffic from mobile ad network AdMob Inc.'s publishers has grown by 104 percent over the last year, indicating the furious growth of the mobile Internet.

In addition to the increased use of Web-enabled smartphones, more people are accessing the mobile Internet from a variety of even the most basic handsets, leading to this doubling of growth.

"People have faster connections to the mobile Web, they are able to access information on the go easier than they did in the past," said Jason Spero, vice president of marketing at AdMob, San Mateo, CA.

"Also there are faster, more advanced phones that are able to get them to the mobile Web," he said.
According to the latest AdMob Mobile Metrics Report, 3,631,315,700 ads were served in June, up 20 percent from May.

U.S. requests jumped 18.7 percent in June to 228 million.

Posting equally good numbers, Indonesian traffic has more than doubled to 472 million requests, making it AdMob's second largest market. New publishers in the AdMob network with sizeable Indonesian inventory helped spur that growth in ad requests.

The mobile Web is quickly becoming the way many people experience the Internet and, in many countries, the only way other than PC Web usage, Mr. Spero said.

The mobile Web's growth will always be a good signal for AdMob as the company hosts more than 5,000 mobile Web publishers, he said.

Perhaps Apple should share some credit for the increased mobile Internet usage and the corresponding rise in ad requests.

The Apple iPhone and iPod touch caused ad impressions to increase by 32 percent worldwide in AdMob's network, to 52 million in June.

The two Apple mobile devices kept their No. 9 position in the top 10 global handset ranking that AdMob maintains to find the device source for its ad requests.

In other findings, AdMob noticed that 24.3 percent of ad requests in its network worldwide were from smartphones, up from a 22.4 percent increase in May.

Also, Motorola handsets lost share in each of the top five markets in June, experiencing a 2.2 percent drop in share of ad requests from AdMob's network worldwide.

However, another handset maker Palm showed continued growth in ad requests. Palm now accounts for 2 percent of ad requests made across the entire AdMob network.

"This is encouraging for people who are developing mobile Web sites in the mobile space," Mr. Spero said.

"It is showing people that the mobile Web is an actual space and is growing," he said. "People have been skeptical in the past about where the mobile Web is going, and these numbers show the exact opposite of that -- it is growing.

"We have heard that the metrics report is an important tool for developers as they work to understand screen sizes, device capabilities and more, and try to make decisions about their products."