It’s always been apparent that Google has been taking a wait-and-see approach towards mobile advertising. They bought in at the right time with AdMob.
A couple of years ago, I was working on the online advertising market, and I had colleagues who specialized in the mobile platform. At the time, I was lectured several times about how “mobile” and “online” were very different markets…and how Google really needed to get their act together…like Yahoo!
As I said, that was a couple of years ago. Today, Yahoo! continues on the company’s flat spin, executing on the directionless plan of cost containment and executive shedding. And Google is snapping up AdMob for $750 million.
In the past, I had argued that Google would snap up AdMob (or whichever other company would make sense) when it became clear that there was a market. Earlier players AOL (Third Screen Media), Microsoft (Screen Tonic) and Nokia (EnPocket) had made their acquisitions back in 2007, focusing on mobile marketing services companies whose names will be shortly forgotten.
The finance community loved marketing services back in 2007 and 2008, but when it became apparent that there is little scalability in the agency business and display advertising (in a market dominated by search), that’s when things turned south. Nokia scaled back their ad network operations earlier this year, and the report for AOL is pretty grim.
It doesn’t help that the third screen (that’s the mobile phone) is seriously limited in terms of advertising footprint and overall capacity. Mobile-specific websites just can’t carry as much display advertising as websites displayed on a computer screen. And the market is starting to settle down now that it’s clear that the iPhone phenomenon hasn’t translated across the mobile industry.
Industry initiatives such as dot.mobi haven’t been able to shift consumer behavior, and most users still go to traditional web addresses, taxing a web development community that has barely been able figure out how to redirect mobile device users to mobile-specific websites capable of delivering a contextual experience.
As a user of multiple mobile devices, I have to say that the web experience remains so hopelessly pathetic that I often just wait to find a computer capable of displaying a website and reserve the mobile device for messaging, PIM and communications.
I know that Nokia’s Symbian OS is the leading smartphone operating system, and the Nokia web experience on my N95 8GB is mostly disappointing. I also have a Nokia N810 Internet Tablet running Maemo (Linux) — I keep trying to make this device work, but I abandon most web pages before they finish downloading.
But this market is finally growing, and it’s clearly time for Google to get into it in full force. AdMob has always been the logical next step, and it’s good to see Google entering the mobile advertising market…for real.
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