The Internet has gone mobile. In just the few short years that the Internet has been in existence, it has gone from being a dial-up medium, to a hard-wired medium, to the wireless medium that it is today.

And with the invention of the “smart phone”, mobile media was born. In the early days of offering the Internet via cell phones, getting online meant browsing text-only websites, and having to pay for Internet usage on a per-minute or a per-kilobyte basis.

Now that millions of people across the world are browsing the Internet with their smart phones, an entire genre of web content is now flourishing, known as mobile media. Websites are being designed to meet the following specifications:

• More and more websites are being designed for smart phones, to be location-aware, using GPS services, to provide you with relevant information, pertinent to where you happen to be at the moment that you visit the website. This could be any type of location-based information, such as the weather, the news, directions, local businesses, movie theaters, TV listings, local sports broadcasts, online radio stations, and more.
• Websites are being designed to require less typing and more reliance on the manual dexterity of smart phone touch screens. Pinching and swiping will eventually herald the demise of the mouse.
• Websites are being designed with “mobile versions”, that are more light-weight, for faster loading over slower over-the-air browsing speeds.

Many skeptics of the smart phone revolution questioned how you could monetize mobile media. But advertisers are rejoicing in the fact that mobile media actually makes it easier to reach a more targeted demographic. Let’s take a look at some examples of mobile media and the way it is being monetized in today’s world of smart phones:

• The ability to download movies and music, through services such as Netflix, Itunes, the Amazon Kindle app.
• The ability to display targeted advertisements within various applications.
• The existence of online app stores / application market places where you can purchase applications for instant download.
• Local businesses are able to benefit from GPS-enabled smart phones, which enable people to search for local businesses nearby them.

It has been suggested that the era of the laptop and the desktop are soon coming to an end, now that tablet computers and smart phones are gaining a lion’s share of worldwide Internet traffic. While this is a subject of a great deal of debate, there is no denying the fact that mobile marketingis a wide open market with ever-expanding potential, as the amount of mobile web browsing continues to grow.

What makes mobile media so unique is that it is portable, it follows you everywhere you go, it is accessible from anywhere, and it can be personalized. Plus, distribution of mobile mediacontent exists largely “in the cloud”. You no longer have to have the media exist on your computer as an actual file. You can just access it from the Internet.