Yahoo Mobile Banner Ads? Are You Kidding Me?

Google has been not so quietly moving into the mobile domain lately, even working on mobile ads, so that they can offer free cell phones. Microsoft is getting into municipal Wi-Fi so that they can offer localized advertising. Yahoo, too, is going after the mobile ad market. While Google is presumably going for text-based mobile ads, to complement their Google AdSense, Yahoo plans on banner ads on mobile browsers.

Really? Have you seen how small most mobile phones, even PDAs like the Palm Treo, are? I pray you don’t give us persistent ads. It’s not clear to me if this is only for users of Yahoo’s mobile websites, but I assume so. If you go mobile, you’d better have a damn good return for the user. Because why would I want to pay high cellular data bandwidth costs so that you can earn money?

Problem is that the word is these banners will appear on mobile web-based e-mail and other services for subscribers of all major US mobile operators. That may mean you have no choice, in some instances. I might be overreacting, but it doesn’t sound good. At least Google is planning on offering free phones. What is Yahoo offering me?