Facebook's audience and consumption growth is now generating substantial and rising display advertising revenue, with consensus estimates of $2 billion in 2010, up 160% YoY, and it will overtake Google on this count this year

The social network's growing position as the centre of the internet experience is enabling it to become a platform for other services, such as e-commerce, making it an increasing strategic threat to Google, as well as other players in the digital media

More importantly, like Google before it, Facebook’s scale and function has the power to disrupt the digital e-commerce and marketing models built over the past decade

European mobile revenue growth improved very slightly in Q4 2010, up by 0.1ppt in reported and 0.2ppts in underlying terms, but remained negative

While the improvement is welcome, growth remains very subdued compared to pre-recession levels, especially in Italy and Spain, which continue to lag the growth of the UK, Germany and France

The outlook for mobile revenue growth is bleak, with severe MTR cuts in Germany and the UK likely to drive growth down again over the next six months

Smartphones are rapidly moving to become a majority of UK mobile handset sales, driving a surge in mobile internet use. Even if usage per user (currently growing) flattens out, we forecast mobile internet usage to grow from 1.8bn hours in 2010 to 7bn in 2015: 28% of total online time

This should drive the long promised growth in mobile advertising and we project UK spend, including search and display, will rise to £420 million by 2015, equivalent to 10% of PC internet search/display advertising

We expect the majority of this usage to be incremental to PC-based consumption, as users find new things to do and buy on the mobile web, driving the overall online advertising market to further growth

By 2015 we expect internet-centric smartphone penetration in the UK to reach 75% and mobile internet use to reach 28% of total time spent online. The dynamics and ecosystems of the mobile internet, and in particular the app model, will become a significant part of overall digital strategies

First seen as an interim reaction to slow networks and small screens, mobile apps have become a major new route to market for publishers and ecommerce providers, and are likely to spread to new areas

However, Apple is likely to continue to lose share in the internet-centric smartphone market, and publishers will face a far messier, fragmented world of competing platforms, app stores and payment systems