Vodafone: Cheaper phone bills can ad up

Vodafone has revealed that it will partner with Yahoo! to offer its subscribers the chance to swap cheaper phone bills for adverts on their handsets.

The pair announced a strategic alliance today that will see them club together to place adverts on phones, a move the operator first hinted at in May of this year.

Since then, the companies have been experimenting with mobile advertising and will roll out the scheme in the first half of next year.

In return for agreeing to accept sales messages, punters will typically get discounts on media services such as MMS and TV.

Yahoo! has been pushing the idea of mobile advertising lately, talking up search keywords after having signed a deal with NTT DoCoMo in Japan.

The mobile advertising market will be worth over $11bn by 2011, according to analysts Informa. Nicky Walton, analyst at Informa, said: "The key reason mobile advertising has come to the fore is that the content is available and the inventory is there. Those kinds of services haven't been around for advertisers to feed off before."