The iPhone is only 70 days old, but with 12 million devices out there and 100 million apps downloaded, its clear that there is a real emerging market in ads specifically tailored for the iPhone.

Already, a number of new ad networks are targeting the app developer community. The largest of these appears to be Sequoia Capital / Accel backed AdMob . AdMob is several years old, and claims to serve close to 4 billion mobile impressions per month, although the vast majority of these are on non-iPhone handsets.

AdMob supports a number of different ad-formats, including click to play video and click to call. These new formats showcase the uniqueness of the iPhone as an advertising delivery platform: the user is not only at a known location, and online, but they are also a click away from placing an ordinary handset call. Still, the ad format that we think will be the most prevalent: advertising for other apps within an app. As the company says:

“The target audience for iPhone app developers is iPhone users, and the most effective way to reach these users is to make your app top-of-mind while they are using their iPhones with Action: App Store ads.”

Another emerging ad network to watch is Pinch Media, funded by Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital and several well known angel investors. The website doesn’t go into much detail on the advertising network (the original premise of the company was more of a “Google Analytics For iPhone” product), but the backers are solid.

Finally, NY based Medialets, led by Eric Litman, one of the co-founders of Proxicom, an interactive web agency that went public in 1999. We’ve been in touch with the company, which is in discussion with several VCs at the moment – and will definitely follow through as time goes on. Like Pinch Media, the company offers both an analytics tool as well as advertising sales services – and seems to have some initial traction with high visibility clients.

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category: Round-Up