You probably have it in your pocket.

I had a lot of interesting conversations at BIMS about monetizing mobile traffic. The concern is that as traffic moves from a desktop, where there are several ads per page view, to tablet and mobile, where there are fewer ads per page view, it’s harder to keep the same revenue.

Everyone I spoke with at BIMS agreed that it is a serious problem and that you can’t reasonably hope to make up the difference by charging more for the ads on mobile. That would be an easy and convenient solution, but it’s not going to happen.

The consensus seemed to be that it’s better to have a completely different monetization strategy for mobile, but there was a lot of confusion on what, exactly, that other strategy ought to be.

Some said you should move mobile traffic to sponsored apps, but it wasn’t very clear to me how that would solve the revenue problem. It seems to me it could make the revenue problem worse because now you’d have to spend money to support the app.

Also, a lot of the traffic on an ad-supported site is “drive by.” Or “one and done” as my friend Ed Coburn called it. If the “one” view is “hey, go get our app,” I think you get a whole lot of nothing out of it.

A few people were promoting native ads as the solution, although that seems to introduce a split personality problem in your content strategy — i.e., you’d have one type of content on the desktop and another on mobile. Wouldn’t that be a little odd?

Another option is to change the revenue model on mobile from ads to engagement — i.e., try to collect more emails on tablets and mobile and monetize the emails. That could be a matter of pushing email sign-ups more heavily, or you could do it by requiring registration to view all or some of the mobile site.

I prefer that last option because I lean towards subscription-based models for publishers. Relying on ads has always struck me as a very iffy way to go. However, I admit that I don’t have an answer to this question. It’s something we’re going to have to watch carefully.