News is a very popular category on mobile devices, with more than 50% of mobile users accessing some form of news content on their handsets. And now with the iPad and its competitors (Kindle, et al) there is a serious mobile-news consumption device, the tablet.

Wired magazine says that already 26% of its mobile traffic is coming from the iPad.

Now mobile platform platform provider and local-mobile ad network Verve Wireless has teamed up with the Audit Bureau of Circulations to capture more "granular" data on news consumption via mobile devices. Here are the metrics the partnership will help generate and monitor:

• Mobile audience by device type
• Mobile audience by day and day part
• Audience access points (app, mobile browser, e-reader)
• Unique visitors
• Page views

Wired says that its iPad users appear to have substituted the device for the iPhone so the magazine preliminarily concludes the audience hasn't necessarily grown. However it implies that Pad users are more engaged.

The Verve-ABC release offers some Verve-specific metrics on mobile news consumption:

• [Verve] anticipates serving more than 2.2 billion mobile news pages in 2010.
• Mobile advertising revenues have grown across Verve's network of media partners 30 percent each month since November.
• In March, more than 160 million mobile news pages were served, a 214 percent increase year over year.
• More than nine million readers accessed news from mobile devices via Verve's mobile publishing platform in March, representing a 243 percent increase compared to the prior year.
• More than four million of its mobile news apps have been downloaded to  . . . smartphones.

Verve operates a local-mobile ad network; so do LSN, Where, IAC/CitySearch and LocalAdXchange.