Google to pay $US750m for mobile advertising start-up AdMob

Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 10 November 2009 01:22

IT Industry - Deals

Google is to acquire AdMob, a three year old mobile display ad technology provider, for $US750 million in stock, to enhance its expertise and technology in mobile advertising and to give its advertisers and publishers more choice in mobile advertising.

AdMob works with mobile publishers and developers to monetise their mobile Web sites or applications with advertising. It offers a suite of services for mobile publishers, including analytics, ad support across multiple mobile platforms and the ability for developers to reserve a portion of their inventory to serve house ads.

"Mobile advertising has enormous potential as a marketing medium and while this industry is still in the early stages of development, AdMob has already made exceptional progress in a very short time," said Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management at Google. "AdMob is the quintessential Silicon Valley startup – generating impressive year on year revenue growth."

"Despite the tremendous growth in mobile usage and the substantial investment by many businesses in the space, the mobile web is still in its early stages. We believe that great mobile advertising products can encourage even more growth in the mobile ecosystem. That's what has us excited about this deal."

According to Wojcicki, "iPhone and Android users browse the Internet more often than anyone else contributing to Google's 5x mobile search growth over the past two years. And a quarter of these same iPhone and Android users spend nearly 90 minutes per day using applications on their devices."

Google said the deal would help it develop more effective tools for creating, serving and analysing emerging mobile ads formats. "As this ecosystem continues to grow, the company expects these new marketing media to offer significant benefits: Advertisers will be better able to engage mobile users with AdMob's ad formats. Publishers and developers will be able to monetise their content more effectively, which has benefits for the wider mobile ecosystem. Users will see more relevant ads and ultimately get access to more ad-supported content and applications – improving their mobile experience."

AdMob, which has just opened its regional HQ in Singapore, claims to be the world's largest and fastest growing mobile advertising platform. (According to Wojcicki, it was founded in 2006 by Omar Hamoui "when he couldn't find good ways to generate traffic for his mobile site.") Outside of the United States, the company says that India and Indonesia are its largest markets with a combined total of more than one billion requests in September 2009.

AdMob says it has seen iPhone usage explode in advanced markets such as Australia, Singapore, and Hong Kong. In Australia alone, AdMob claims to receive more than 100 million ad requests per month on the iPhone and to reach more than one million unique users. AdMob has localised sites for English, Bahasa and Chinese.