Daily Mail expects half its mobile visitors to be via mobile in five years, while other major brands such as Facebook and eBay prepare for mobile-first strategies.

Speaking at Ad:Tech today Daily Mail publisher Martin Clarke said in the next five years it expected over 50% of readers to come via mobile. However, he said that the majority of advertisers had not yet woken to the opportunity of mobile yet but that he predicted the channel to deliver higher yields than online in the future.

Clarke singled out geo-location as a particular area of growth, “We are making good revenue but in future it will become vastly more important, particularly with location based ads…We can also provide richer feedback on mobile customers,” he said.

This will be music to the ears of location-based service Foursquare which has announced greater plans for the UK, including a plan to increase staff.

Holger Luedorf, Foursquare, senior VP of business development, said, ““We have our self-service platforms [essentially for smaller merchants]… and our London team is also focused on speaking with [bigger] brands and social media agencies.”

But elsewhere this week, while agreeing that mobile was a key driver in its future strategy, eBay senior director of European mobile commerce Olivier Ropas, said, “In terms of coupons or geotargeting, advertisers dont like coupons because you could be just paying for someone to try your product once and only sometimes may it really work. It is not where the growth will come from.”

Multichannel was where Ropas and fellow panelist Sienne Viet, Morrisons and Kiddicae head of mobile, saw growth. The two were speaking at an event by Facebook aimed at UK retailers in which Facebook admitted that as a business it was now mobile-first.