Continuing its strong mobile focus, Google today said that AdMob, the mobile advertising company it acquired last year for $750 million, is rolling out new tools to support a to make money from advertising — rather than be routed around by third-party networks like AdMob.
TechCrunch has more details on the new AdMob tools:
The new Android SDK allows for expandable canvas and multi-panel banner advertisements on Android devices, with the updated iPhone SDK featuring performance enhancements and additional server side flexibility. The new Flash Lite SDK, which is in beta, enables monetization with CPC text ads. And AdMob is rolling out a new adaptive mobile ad unit, which allows for a banner sizes ad unit to remain a constant size as consumers pinch and scroll through a Web site that’s designed for a PC screen on their mobile device.
Connected Planet’s take, Sarah Reedy:
The more ads developers, carriers and companies can use on mobile to reduce the cost of apps and make a business for themselves, the better. The less intrusive and more valuable they can be to more consumers, the better. Mobile advertising done well should be a win-win scenario. As such, AdMob and OpenWave’s tools for mobile advertisers could have nothing but upside, as long as the emphasis is on making the ads less intrusive and more valuable, that is. It appears both are attempting to do this with their respective announcements of enhanced tools and new partnerships. As a result, the battle between operators and third-party networks to drive mobile advertising is also starting to get really interesting.
As OpenWave pointed out this week, mobile operators have always had detailed information on their subscribers, they just needed to do something with it in a way that doesn’t invade users’ privacy but actually adds value to them. It would make sense that the provider that’s able to offer the most targeted, unobtrusive, effective ads will be the most successful, and carriers seem to have a leg up there. But as Google demonstrated today with AdMob, it has access to every operator and a multitude of devices and operating systems — something operators can’t claim today (at least not the multiple-carrier angle). It remains to be seen how fast the carriers will move in this space that AdMob is already quickly taking over. If competition does continue to heat up, though, hopefully the consumer will be the one who wins.
That’s our take on this. Let us know what you think in the comments section below: