McAndrews the availability of display advertising across two popular Windows Live for mobile services, the launch of new markets for Windows Live for mobile services, and upcoming advertising plans for its Live Search Mobile offering.

Up until now, according to statistics, cell phone advertising has had a slow growth rate due to the fact that most subscribers in the U.S. still use their phones primarily for talking. Lately though, the statistics are beginning to change, and users tend to become more oriented towards the multiple services on their phone.

Microsoft said advertisers can now extend their campaigns to social media through Windows Live for mobile in France, Spain, the UK and the US by creating banner ads that will be visible across Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail. This builds upon Microsoft's initial launch of mobile advertising for MSN Mobile in France, Spain, the U.K. and the U.S. where mobile ads are available alongside premium MSN Mobile content.

The new service is already available in Spain, and later this month will be available in Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, further extending its availability for advertisers.

The three major internet based providers – Microsoft, Google and Yahoo – consider the mobile advertising service as a lucrative investment that could possibly increase their revenue even more than the online advertising does.

In September, Google announced AdSense For Mobile, a service which works in a similar way as it does on PCs: the publishers are allowed to place AdSense contextual advertising on the web sites design for the mobile phones, so that the traffic could be monetized.

Last month, Google introduced brand-image ads for mobile phones. The images are specially designed to fit on mobile phone screens and are targeted according to the keywords users type into phones to search for information.

The pricing scheme is the usual pay-per-click which made Google so successful. Only one image per page will be displayed to avoid cramming of too many elements on the relatively tiny displays on mobile phones.