If you’re on your phone and see something along the lines of “Punch K-Fed to win an iPod!,” with an animated GIF of the mook, you can blame Yahoo!. The geniuses at the Y have decided that your mobile phone screen is a prime place to show “graphical advertisements,” which sounds a lot like banner ads to these ears. If you’re on a metered data plan (most cell phone users who use the mobile web are), then this could suck worse than Rumsfeld’s week.

Hopefully operators who place the mobile Yahoo! links on their mobile homepages will work out some sort of deal to offset this, as they have with services like Google’s mobile sites, but we’re not counting on it.

The good news is that Yahoo! is sticking to the mobile Web for now, meaning you won’t get animated (and costly) MMS messages, at least not yet, though it’s a realistic and bleak view of the future of Man.

Yahoo! Launches Graphical Advertising on Mobile Web in United States