The Nasdaq crash and subsequent dot com bubble bursting led to the drying up of VC-supported advertising buys, which ushered in an era of performance based campaigns.  Obviously, Google won that game, as 40% of US online ad revenues go through its coffers.

Today, any semblance of a paid content/subscription model is scrapped for an ad-supported one, leading many to conclude that the wireless platform too will adopt a similar model.

Will it?  I don’t know.  Online advertising is possible to the large screen, in mobile, advertising will prove too cumbersome for users to put up with.  Bear in mind, for example, that the most successful advertising-supported company, Google, offers rather unobtrusive ad formats.

Mobile devices and cell phones in general are a central communications tool, but of late (last 5 years) they have really fought tooth and nail to earn a central role in content and commerce as well.  I am still unsure of when we’ll be able to use our cell phones as virtual wallets, but when you consider that Nokia is in some ways the biggest camera company in the world, or Apple leveraged its iPod to move into phones via the iPhone… you see that wireless devices are strangling content around the neck.

With online video, there is bound to be a bottleneck… as more and more content ends up on wireless devices, I wonder, will it really be ad-supported?

I’d like to believe that, but it’s not a given.  In other words, just because ad-supported free models beat out subscription models, does that mean that in the wireless world it will too?

After all, the initial reason why subscriptions never took off was because people did not want to enter their credit card numbers online… but with my cell phone, the carrier’s already got my credit card, so maybe the subscription model might work after all.