We've just released a new report that forecasts the European mobile advertising market (which includes mobile display advertising and mobile search marketing, but NOT mobile messaging ads like SMS and MMS ads) will reach €1.3 billion in 2012. The biggest driver for the growth of the market will be consumers' increasing use of mobile browsing: we're forecasting that by 2012, 40 percent of Europeans will browse the mobile Internet on a regular basis.

The good news is, as consumer use of mobile browsing grows, many marketers are ready to spend: finding enough mobile ad inventory is one of mobile marketers' biggest concerns. Of course, it's not merely an inventory problem right now — there are plenty of other problems that need to be solved as well. The mobile marketers we surveyed told us that finding more money for mobile ads was their biggest problem, many said mobile advertising CPMs were too high, and a huge number complained about the lack of mobile ad measurement as well. But we believe the growth of mobile browsing will solve the problems around low inventory and high prices, and measurement should also improve significantly as online adserving and measurement vendors continue to push into the mobile space.

The bottom line is, there's huge potential in this market — but the industry needs to overcome quite a few obstacles before that potential can be realized. We think most of those problems will get ironed out over the next five years, and that the market will really start to grow towards the end of that period.

Jupiter clients can read my colleague Thomas Husson's full Mobile Advertising in Europe report here, or my shorter Mobile Marketing in Europe report here. Non-clients can get further details in the press release here.