Openwave Systems has released a report that analyzes the behavior of US consumers on the mobile internet.

The study shows that Social Networks are becoming a preferred replacement for previous means of electronic communication, and Mobile Ad Targeting can add significant value to a campaign.

Openwave produced this study by processing an anonymous sample of actual customer logs from a leading North American operator using the Openwave Mobile Analytics product.

(To learn more about Mobile Analytics, download this white paper and read this interview with Ray Anderson, CEO of Bango.)

Some of the highlights of the report include:

• Sites Visited Operator portals were the most visited sites, followed by Yahoo, MySpace, Facebook, Google and ESPN in that order. Clearly most people in the US still use the operator portal as their homepage.

• Social Networks A detailed analysis of the traffic on social networking sites showed that almost half of the users update their status or send messages to their friends every day, and about a third viewed their friends’ profiles.

  Also, the data showed that consumers tend to have a higher level of interaction with MySpace, compared to other social network sites or portals. The average hits per session at MySpace is more than twice what it is for Facebook, Google, or Yahoo, and over four times that for the operator’s own portal. This clearly has a large implication for the ability to generate advertising inventory.

• Targeted Mobile Advertising Openwave also tracked the mobile ads served through major mobile ad networks. Although AdMob served the most ads – almost 7 times more than its nearest competitor – the AdMob click through rate was also the lowest. Ads served by Microsoft‘s had a 10% higher CTR, while ads served on the BuzzCity network were 100% higher. Openwave concludes that this difference may be due to the less-targeted nature of the ads on AdMob.

“Subscriber data has always been part of an operator’s asset base, however extracting this information and transforming it to gain subscriber insight has been lacking,” said Dan Nguyen, interim vice president, products and marketing, Openwave. “In the current economic climate, better subscriber information and deep subscriber insight may help operators retain and gain customers.”

To download the entire report, visit this Openwave webpage.