Google and AdMob: Mobile Location Ad Network Coming?
Ok by now everyone has heard the news that Google plunked down $750 million to buy Admob. It’s no secret that Google has big plans in mobile advertising, and AdMob was a leading player in the space so it shouldn’t have been all that surprising.
Tech Crunch had one of the best summaries of why it makes sense and the nice fit between the two companies… the article is definitely worth a read. My two cent summary from that article and others on the deal:
- Google has talked over and over again on the potential they see for mobile in general as well as location aware mobile, and this is still early times so buying the leader now for $750 million was probably better than waiting another couple of years and paying closer to the $3.1B they paid for Doubleclick
- AdMob is somewhat reminescent of an early doubleclick, back when they still ran an ad network business, although without the customer concentration issues Doubleclick had with Alta Vista back then
- AdMob was supposedly doing ~$100 million in gross revenue with a 60/40 rev share with publishers/app developers, and already growing at a fast clip, with some particular success in applications
- the aquisition of Doubleclick didn’t help Google much in the mobile world
- AdMob had a strong presence among the long tail of the small publisher and app developer community… sound familiar? The mobile long tail of app developers and wap site developers is quite similar to the long tail of web pubishers that has been the goldmine for Google
- Apple Iphone/itouch devices made up nearly half of ad requests, so its a great way to profit from the popularity of that platform… and expect that Google will make this a key component of the offering available to Android application developers as well, creating a nice premium display smartphone mobile ad network for advertisers.
So, on the surface there is not much related to location awareness going on here… just a large mobile ad network that has great potential to be a leader on sophisticated high end smartphones given their current success on iPhones and soon on Andriod phones. But these same devices are the ones that will be leaders in bringing new location aware consumer services to market and you have to think that location relevance targeting will be on top of the development list. The folks from IPG seem to agree… from their Future of media blog:
“Google does location very well. AdMob’s one “weakness” is a lack of hyper-location targeting. Google’s problem with hyper-location targeting has been one of scale – only a handful of apps were being powered by its in-app solution. With several billion ad requests a month, AdMob will add the scale to allow Google to roll out a location targeting mobile ad solution. It’s highly likely that this will be one of the first major things to come of this acquisition.”
