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What the advertiser failed to recognize, Chernin said, is that the MySpace homepage has as many viewers every day as the SuperBowl has once a year. (Of course, there’s a good argument that MySpace visitors aren’t quite as engaged with the content as SuperBowl viewers are.)

Mobile is attractive because of its scale. It “is by far the most penetrated device on earth,” he said. “So it’s this enormous distribution platform, but by definition you’re not going to be watching two-hour movies. It’s going to be interesting to see people develop uniquely mobile content.” It will take the medium a long time to develop, he said and predicted that in two years, the industry will still be trying to figure mobile out.

Perhaps an even bigger problem is that both Facebook and MySpace fail to offer an optimized version for Japanese handsets. Millions of Japanese are accustomed to using one thumb, a dialpad and a jog dial on their phones when accessing the web during their commutes to school and work. In this country, the mobile web is bigger than the PC web.

Offering a country-specific version before a local copycat beats you to it is an obvious key factor for success, and not only in Japan.

Practical experience from the Japanese web industry has shown that partnering up with a local company is the best way to diminish these dangers

I should mention that mobile search has been growing quite a bit, and of course you may have heard about our partnership that we've launched in this past quarter with NTT DoCoMo in Japan. Japan is a very strong market for mobile search because of the devices, because of the culture it is just a really tremendous environment. People do many, many mobile searches. We have a robust advertising market there for mobile search. We are certainly optimistic that many of these advances which may initiate in Japan will carry over to the rest of the world as the devices and culture catch up.

In other comments, Schmidt reiterated his belief that advertising on mobile devices eventually will emerge as Google's biggest source of profits. The company hopes to be in a better position to deliver ads to people on the go during the second half of this year when it's scheduled to unveil its new mobile software package, "Android."