The GSMA yesterday teamed with comScore on the launch of its Mobile Media Metrics service, which aims to provide a census of mobile media behaviour. This is intended to help brands and advertising agencies better plan and measure campaigns on mobile phones. The initiative is targeting the UK market at launch, having signed up O2, Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and 3UK as partners. Future market launches are on the horizon. ““The underlying principle of Mobile Media Metrics is to deliver valuable and actionable reporting tools to the media industry, while respecting the privacy of individuals,” noted GSMA CEO Rob Conway in a statement. “Access to transparent measurement is essential in establishing mobile as a legitimate advertising medium, and Mobile Media Metrics is a critical element in advancing this process.”

Launch of the initiative was supported by anonymised data on the UK mobile Internet market in December. According to the data – that included numbers from Vodafone, Orange and O2 – social networking site Facebook dominated mobile Internet traffic in the month, accounting for nearly half of all the time people in the UK spend going online using their handsets. Around 16 million people in the UK accessed the Internet via mobile phone in December, viewing nearly 7 billion pages of online content. The true number of UK mobile Web users is likely to be even greater once data from T-Mobile and 3 is added to the metrics by early April.