Google has confirmed that they've just acquired mobile advertising firm, Admob. http://thenextweb.com/2009/11/09/google-reportedly-acquired-admob-750-million-stock/ I think this is important to developers. Despite being the largest mobile advertisers, Admob has been attached to a lot of bad user reviews - They apparently don't do enough to stop click fraud, their advertising settings are very inflexible and cause 'money-drain' to advertisers, and their percent rates that they pay to publishers is very low. Google is pretty much the opposite of admob in all of these departments, so in theory, Google will get involved with the way admob works and make it more similar to Google adsense, leading to better deals for advertisers and publishers (developers.) …In theory.
This is interesting. Didn't AdMob recently acquire AdWhirl? The mobile advertising world seems to be moving pretty fast. Here's some more info: http://www.admob.com/google http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/11/investing-in-mobile-future-with-admob.html http://www.google.com/press/admob/index.html
Yeah, this can be very good for developers. I am hopeful that Google will make improvements to make Admob more friendly to advertisers and publishers alike. One industry analyst summarized the reasons for Google's acquisition of Admob this way: "It should help not only to provide more relationships with mobile ad publishers and buyers, but also to provide a tested technology platform for monetization of mobile inventory and the delivery, tracking, and reporting of mobile ad campaigns" (http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2009/tc2009119_588360.htm). So, by making this acquisition, Google can leverage Admob's existing technology and Google's own experiences/resources with Adsense and get into the mobile advertisement space in a big way, quickly. I think theory will become reality soon enough... =)
