Smaato (http://www.smaato.com), a mobile ad optimizer and mobile advertising company, has announced a compilation of mobile advertising trends for 2011. Smaato gathered market data for the three strongest regions in mobile marketing: the USA, Europe and Asia.

The trends show that, in 2010, the iTunes Store tippled its offering of mobile applications and the Android market was established as the second largest app store. Android bypassed Apple with a market share of 25% (Apple has 17%) and is now the second largest OS behind Symbian (37%) according to Morgan Stanley.

The growth of mobile as an established media channel will continue the next couple of years, according to Harald Neidhardt, CMO and co-founder, Smaato. Asia is still the leader in mobile advertising and will proceed being the strongest market in terms of ad spending. In 2010 Japanese companies already invested more than $1 billion in this business followed by South Korea and China ($270M and $180M). In Asia more than 15 billion page impressions are being generated on a daily basis in mobile.

The US is the second largest market globally in terms of mobile advertising spending behind Japan. It will close the gap next year with a forecast of $1,24 billion and will grow up to $5 billion in 2015.

The top 5 European countries (UK, Italy, France, Germany, Spain) will see a huge increase in mobile ad spending according to Smaato. By the end of 2010 these “Big Five” are estimated to have 65 million mobile internet users; this number will more than double within the next five years up to 160 million. The “Big Five” will reach the US$1 billion mark approximately in 2014.