the life and times of AdMob

New Year, New Blog

2008-01-18T10:33:00.000-08:00

Hey Folks,

Just wanted to let everyone know we've moved the AdMob blog to a new URL:

blog.admob.com

RSS Feed: blog.admob.com/feed/

Come check out the sleek new design! We'll be posting all future blog entries there, so update your RSS reader and browser bookmarks accordingly!

Thanks,

AdMob

AdMob Across The Pacific

2007-12-10T21:58:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty excited about our latest site update. For the first time ever, our site is available in another language. The AdMob network has long had traffic from all over the world (around 160 countries), but it has taken a bit of work to get our UI into a state which makes for easy internationalization.

Today we got there, so for our first trick: AdMob in Japanese!

And don't worry, we have more languages on the way shortly.

Making Google Mobile Search Work for Your Site

2007-11-29T09:52:00.000-08:00

Google has made changes to their mobile search. Although many of the improvements are laudable, it also has created some difficulities for mobile specific sites. Users now see both mobile web and desktop web results when searching using their mobile device, all within the same set of search results. Google identifies sites it thinks are intended for desktop viewing and sends those URLs through the Google Wireless Transcoder (GWT) to transcode them for mobile, rather than linking directly to the website. Examples of transcoded desktop sites can be seen by searching in http://www.google.com/m. The transcoded sites can be identified by looking at the link URL, as they are prefixed with http://www.google.com/gwt/n? .

This can result in these difficulties for mobile site owners:

If your site has both a desktop representation and a mobile representation, you would want Google to rank the mobile representation higher than the transcoded desktop representation in mobile search results. This is not always the case. Users may be directed to the transcoded version of your desktop site, which may not provide the user experience you intended.

Sometimes Google will mistakenly think your mobile site is intended for desktop use, and will send your mobile site through the GWT. Given that your mobile site is already designed for mobile use, this may negatively impact the user experience and potentially break functionality such as targeting or billing using the phone's User-Agent or IP address.

Understandably, many in the mobile web community are concerned about the impact of Google's practice of transcoding desktop sites * . Fortunately, there is a simple fix to make Google mobile search work for you. I think it is useful to share this with everyone who operates a mobile site. Here is the recipe:

Put this tag in the <head> section of all the pages in your site, whether intended for desktop use or mobile:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/html" media="handheld" href="http://example.mobi/" title="Mobile/PDA">

replace http://example.mobi/ with your page’s URL. When you have both a desktop and mobile version of your site, using this link tag tells the Google Wireless Transcoder to redirect the user to the mobile version.

Let me illustrate this with an example. Our site, TapTap, has implemented the link tag. When you search for "TapTap" on http://www.google.com/m , you will see several results. At the time of writing, the first result goes to http://taptap.net/ , the desktop version of our home page, sent through the GWT. By putting the link tag in our desktop page, we are able to send users on the phone to our mobile version at http://m.taptap.net/ , instead of having Google transcode our desktop page, which are less useful for users on the phone.

Lower in the search results, you can see our mobile site. Unfortunately, Google misidentifies our mobile site as being for desktop use and sends it through the GWT http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fm.taptap.net%2F . By implementing the link tag in our mobile page at http://m.taptap.net/ , we are able to tell the GWT not to transcode the page, sending users directly to http://m.taptap.net/ as desired.

Note that this may not alter the ranking of your site in Google's index. This is simply a way to tell the GWT to send the user directly to your mobile content, regardless of your ranking.

What to put in the href is also important. If possible, you should put the URL of the mobile equivalent of the current page, or put the URL of the current page if the page is designed for mobile. If you always put the front page of your mobile site in the link tag, it may prevent users from reaching their desired page directly from the Google search results.

We hope this is useful for you.

* Nadir Garouche from SEO Principle has a detailed blog post about Google's decision here . Dennis from WAP Review has also chimed in . There are some reports of difficulties in various mailing lists, such as this one .

Data Goodness - AdMob Mobile Metrics October

2007-11-28T07:19:00.000-08:00

We love data. Data is the fuel that powers AdMob's targeting and monetization. We work hard to collect and store the information provided by networks and browsers. AdMob has built proprietary techniques for determining device capabilities while maintaining anonymity and strict privacy. We use the data from every ad request, impression and click to optimize ad matching. We love data.

Recently, we began sharing some of this data for use by the AdMob community with our AdMob Mobile Metrics report. Yesterday we posted the data from October - you can download the free report here. Among other things, the report shows handset share by country. We were interested to see dramatic movement in the share of the iPhone in the US (0.4% in September to 0.9% in October). Next month, we should be able to gauge the ramp of iPhone browser usage in Europe.

We hope the data will help with optimization of mobile content and ad campaigns. Please let us know what other data we can include that would further help with visibility around the mobile ecosystem. You can subscribe to receive future reports and send us feedback at metrics@admob.com.

Built anything for Facebook Mobile?

2007-11-01T11:32:00.000-07:00

Folks at AdMob get excited about open platforms and slick mobile websites, so naturally we loved Facebook's recent decision to extend their developer platform to mobile (you can check out Facebook from your phone at m.facebook.com). It's a great decision, and one that will spur more innovation as developers build mobile apps for the Facebook community.

This morning, we announced AdMob's mobile advertising solution for Facebook, making it easy to monetize any Facebook mobile app. We're also sharing code for a sample application called AdMob Footprints (based on the original Footprints app) showing how to build a mobile app. Check it out here: admob.com/facebook.

Let us know if you have any questions or feedback. We can't wait to see what you're working on.

- Donnie and Mike

Lunch 2.0 Event Invitation

2007-10-23T14:09:00.000-07:00

Join the AdMob Team for Lunch 2.0 and Halloween treats! Come find out how we are changing the mobile industry through engineering innovation. Founder, CEO and former Engineer Omar Hamoui will give a brief presentation about AdMob.

Event Details

Directions

See you there!

time to share some data

2007-10-17T14:03:00.000-07:00

I'm excited to report that after much work and lots of internal debate, we've decided to publicly share some of the interesting mobile internet usage data we gather every day. Today we're launching the AdMob Mobile Metrics program which entails the monthly release of a free report on the global activity we are seeing.

Our first report covers both country and handset/manufacturer data as well as some specifics on handset capability. We expect to expand the report to include more axes of information in the coming months.

You can find more details and the report here.

Special thanks to AdMob marketing and Mike "I will launch a whole program for your company during my summer internship" Fyall for all the hard work.

What the iPhone can teach you about your ad copy

2007-09-19T17:33:00.000-07:00

When we announced our iPhone ad unit back in August, we wrote about taking advantage of javascript and AJAX, but one of the other technologies we were excited about was the touch interface. Most mobile devices have a very limited input mechanism typically taking the form of a direction button. Pretty restrictive…but, with the iPhone people interact with their very own fingers, which allows you to know exactly where the user touches the screen.

We knew we could put together a dynamic ad unit but we also wondered if we could use the touch interface to provide further insight into the user’s interest in the advertisement itself. Could we follow exactly which words within an advertisement attracted attention?

We began serving iPhone ads about a month ago and we are excited to share some of our initial findings. We found that some words in an ad are clicked on more frequently than other words. For example, let’s say I have an advertisement that reads:

FREE Apple iPhone Wallpapers

By looking at where users clicked on a given ad, we can show advertisers which particular words are drawing users’ attention, for example:

Click through rate (CTR) is a valuable metric to evaluate your ad, but it only allows you to evaluate the ad copy as a whole. By surfacing which words piqued users’ interests, advertisers have a new tool to help understand their audience and optimize their advertisements. Below are a few more examples of actual AdMob ads:

We hope you find this useful!

Special thanks to Wayne Pan, Ayman Farahat and all of the other folks who helped make this possible.

Donnie Flood - AdMob Engineering Team
Josh Snyder - AdMob Optimization Team

a very unboring industry

2007-09-17T20:22:00.000-07:00

Wow! Busy day.

Nokia acquired Enpocket and Google announced AdSense for mobile is widely available just days after they went wide and pushed all AdWords advertisers to mobile. I've written too much on Google as of late. If you happen to be interested in what this means for AdMob, our fairly complete thoughts are here and here.

Good times :)

- Omar

unexpected and unfortunate

2007-09-13T22:57:00.000-07:00

Google did something very big yesterday. I don't think enough people appreciate the magnitude of their latest move in mobile, nor the unfortunate effects it is likely to have. Now let me preface this by saying that since AdMob competes with Google I encourage you to do your own research and form your own opinion

Yesterday Google told their hundreds of thousands of AdWords customers that they would be including ALL ads in their mobile search results. The one proviso was that they had to be able to transcode your page. In other words, if you do not make heavy use of flash or ajax you are pretty much in. They said that it would be free until 11/18 and then they would start charging unless you opted out.

I'm not sure everyone appreciates just how sub-optimal a transcoded experience can be. Transcoding technology works well if you are simply looking for a particular piece of information on a site and you need to get access to it while you are on your phone. It is not, however, the way that you would want to present your company to a potential customer if you were given the choice. Especially if you were paying for it. If you would like to see what a transcoded version of your site *might* look like you can simply type in your URL into their mobile search box. I say "might" because on most devices things end quite a bit worse than this.

What suffers most is the user experience. Google argued (and was probably right) that online search advertising could in many cases enhance the experience for users. Oftentimes, users actually seek out paid advertisements on search results due to the fact that they feel that if someone is paying for their visit, they must have a relevant and compelling offering. Transcoded results will simply not satisfy this expectation.

Let's be clear. I have been anxious and excited about Google's entry into mobile for a long time. I wrote about this extensively here, here, and here. How could the mobile market not benefit from hundreds of thousands of new advertisers learning about mobile when Google came? Wouldn't it be fantastic when they spent the time and money to expose their users to mobile specific content and educate their advertisers on the nuances of mobile? Unfortunately, it doesn't look like much of that is going to happen.

It didn't make any sense at the very beginning of the web when people scanned their brochures and put them up as websites, and it doesn't make any sense to take an advertiser’s website and try to squeeze it into a mobile device. Mobile is and will be a different medium. Most of Google’s advertisers are focused on conversion and ROI. I challenge you to purchase something or fill out a 5 page form on one of their transcoded pages. The worst part is that now, rather than getting excited about mobile, there will be hundreds of thousands of advertisers and millions of users whose first experience with mobile advertising is a bad one.

No one benefits from this. Users are not better off and advertisers are certainly not better off. Frankly, I don't even think Google is better off. As a member of the mobile ecosystem I can’t help thinking that this is a huge opportunity lost, and it's a shame.

a new view

2007-08-24T20:31:00.000-07:00

As I'm writing up this post, our impression counter on our home page just ticked past 6 billion. It's a difficult number to wrap your head around. I did some some quick (read: rough) calculations: if you stacked up 6 billion iPhones end-to-end, you could reach the moon and back! That's quite an amazing number and with it comes an amazing amount of data.

The best way to understand data is to visualize it. So today, we are proud to release our AdMob AdMonitor. It's a unique live view into the AdMob network as a whole. I think it will help our publishers and advertisers understand how powerful and global the AdMob network truly is. If you dare, slide the Ad Sampling Rate to the 'Fastest' setting and see what it's like to drink from the fire hose as they say!

- Wayne Pan
AdMob Engineering

iAdMob

2007-08-06T11:09:00.000-07:00

It's been amazing to watch the amount of developer interest that has exploded up around the iPhone. I attended the iPhoneDevCamp back in July and spent some time walking around asking developers about their background. One thing that surprised me was that most of the developers there were not "mobile" developers -- they had never authored a WAP or XHTML-MP page, had no idea what (or who) WURFL is and for the most part had zero experience in mobile. This is very exciting because anytime you get more developers involved, more innovation happens and mobile just gets bigger and better. To this point, there were over 60 iPhone apps created at the iPhoneDevCamp alone and more launching all the time.

iPhone Javascript for Publishers
One of the reasons that developer interest has been so high is that fact that developers can leverage their existing web skills (HTML, Javascript, CSS and even AJAX) to create highly interactive and dynamic applications for the iPhone. We also wanted to take advantage of the support of Javascript and AJAX so we created iPhone Javascript site code to asynchronously fetch ads from the AdMob network. Publishers can easily download a copy of this code from the Site Install Code page on their My Sites page.

iPhone Ad Unit for Advertisers
Publishers aren't the only ones that get to take advantage of the iPhone. For advertisers we created a special ad unit which can utilize the iPhone Google Maps application. The unit can enable consumers to find your place of business within their zip code just by clicking on your advertisement! We put together a short video to show you exactly how it works.

-Donnie Flood
Senior Engineer, AdMob Inc.

one billion in less than one month

2007-08-01T21:28:00.000-07:00

Well, we said we weren't going to make it a big deal until we could serve a billion ads in less than a month. We just did! That's right, our 5th billion took us just 28 days.

So, here we are, making it a big deal :)

Just Before:

Just After:

No mobile site? No problem.

2007-07-17T15:40:00.000-07:00

Building a mobile website used to be difficult—but no longer! AdMob is committed to making it easier for advertisers to create and conduct mobile ad campaigns, and we’re proud to announce the release of yet another mobile advertising solution on the AdMob Marketplace—AdMob Landing Pages. The Landing Page Builder is a tool that enables advertisers to create mobile web pages for their ads. Here are a few of the benefits we think you’ll be psyched about:

Templates make creation quick & easy—only takes seconds
Choose to have prospects submit email/phone or click-to-call
Drag-and-drop functionality offers control over page layout
Simulated mobile screen helps you tailor your page for mobile
Send-to-SMS feature lets you preview your work on a device
We host the pages for you

We hope you’ll give the Landing Pages a whirl. Click the “My Ads” tab and then select “My Landing Pages” from the left navigation.

nothing evil this way comes

2007-07-13T15:54:00.000-07:00

News has broken (via Self Made Minds) that Google is trialing AdSense for mobile. We have assumed they would do this for quite some time, and have no reason to believe this is not true. This is obviously a significant event for AdMob and mobile as a whole. We've discussed Google with the press and partners ad nauseum and in the blog a number of times as well.
http://admob.blogspot.com/2006/08/plot-thickens.html
http://admob.blogspot.com/2006/01/wwgd.html

In our time as AdMob we saw Google launch AdWords for mobile, Yahoo launch a mobile publisher network, Microsoft acquire ScreenTonic and AOL acquire Third Screen Media. During almost all of these events, someone or other predicted major difficulties for AdMob, and I'm sure this will be no different. I don't mean to downplay Google. We have immense respect for them as an innovator and a competitor (I don't think we've hired a single employee that hasn't quizzed us on our position vis-a-vis Google before coming aboard). I just think there are more than enough cases where a focused company has done well despite competition from Google and other large players.

As I said in one of my previous postings, Google is going to bring new attention to the mobile market as a whole, and this type of competitive activity has only helped in the past. Mobile advertising is really heating up and competitors both large and small are entering the market. This should come as no surprise really. It's how things are supposed to happen. Meanwhile, we're not resting on our laurels. We've been thinking about precisely these competitive dynamics for quite some time, and have been working diligently on a number of initiatives that we are confident will help to cement our position as leaders in this market.

Should be fun.

- Omar

its all about the people

2007-07-06T14:52:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to announce that Luca Passani, an expert in the area of mobile engineering and the driving force behind WURFL and WALL, has joined us here at AdMob. In addition to his work on WURFL, Luca has authored articles and co-authored books on Mobile development. Recently, he published the so-called GAP guidelines, Global Authoring Practices for the Mobile Web, which helps developers create mobile sites with minimal effort.

For those of you not familiar with WURFL here is a brief description:

"WURFL, the Wireless Universal Resource FiLe, is a so-called Device Description Repository , i.e. a database of device profiles, which can be programmatically queried by applications to deliver tailored content to mobile devices. Given the wide array of devices in the market, all with different capabilities, producers of mobile content have a formidable obstacle to overcome. WURFL has come to their rescue by offering an Open Source alternative to expensive (and proprietary) DDR-based systems.

WALL is a WURFL-based application that lets developers build mobile pages using a simple mark-up, WALL will automagically ensure that the mark-up delivered to those devices is intelligible to them. This is no little achievement in a world where devices may or may not understand XHTML and may or may not understand WML."

So why is this important for AdMob? Firstly, it gives us access to one of the most experienced minds in mobile, which is in and of itself a wonderful thing. Secondly as part of our arrangement, we will be supporting WURFL by allowing Luca to spend a considerable amount of his time supporting the project, as well as putting some additional resources into WURFL in order to make sure it continues to run smoothly.

To be clear, we are not trying to take over WURFL or any of the open source projects that support the growth of the mobile web. All of the resources we put into the project are done with no strings attached. AdMob uses WURFL as part of our platform as do thousands of other mobile applications and services (The WURFL repository was downloaded 50,000 times over the past 18 months alone). A free, open, and well resourced WURFL is good for AdMob, and good for the mobile ecosystem as a whole, which is in turn, good for AdMob.

- Omar

4 on the 4th

2007-07-04T20:02:00.000-07:00

We just cleared 4b... though we fell just shy of doing one billion ad impressions in a month. This one took us 35 days. So close!

mobile, mobile, everywhere

2007-06-17T09:06:00.000-07:00

The New York Times has a great article on some leading media companies and what they are doing in mobile. It's very exciting to see the focus they are placing on their mobile initiatives and the early success they are experiencing. For a long time, it took a special kind of company to "get mobile", and usually the companies that understood mobile the best were small and lacked any considerable media assets.

In order for mobile to continue its rapid growth, we have all been waiting for some of the major content companies to come in and make real commitments to the medium. It's exciting to see the early successes of the trailblazers amongst these large players and we look forward to more best of breed content companies joining mobile in a big way. One particularly exciting tidbit from the article:

"But ESPN is clearly onto something. More than nine million people visit its cellphone Web site each month, a following that surpasses the audience of most computer-based Web sites."

Nice.

3B

2007-05-30T12:29:00.000-07:00

Yeah! Another billion. That one took us six weeks. We've decided we're not going to make a big deal about billions any more unless we can pull off a billion impressions in less than a month, or when we hit 10. By the way, Anders called it. He even beat out some AdMob insiders as far as I can tell.

a buyer's market

2007-05-17T22:29:00.000-07:00

The advertising industry in general (DoubleClick, Right Media, 24/7 Real Media) and mobile advertising specifically (Screentonic, Third Screen Media) seem to be in a period of significant consolidation. With these types of acquisitions flying fast and furious, it is fair to wonder both what this means for mobile advertising on the whole and also what the future holds for AdMob specifically.

These acquisitions are a very healthy sign for the mobile advertising industry. The fact that large companies have taken an active interest in the space really goes a long way towards validating both the business model as well as the future opportunity. More importantly, they have selected what we considered to be our most competent and sophisticated competitors in Europe and the US, Screentonic and TSM, respectively. Both of these companies have been trailblazers in mobile advertising, each having worked over four years to establish themselves and set a course for the industry to grow as a whole. Their acquisitions mean that now mobile advertising is no longer the domain of relatively small startups, but rather established interactive advertising giants, namely AOL and Microsoft.

As for AdMob, we will continue to do what we have been doing: growing the network, and working to develop better and more innovative advertising and publishing solutions for our clients. Despite the fact that an early exit can never be ruled out, we feel that our opportunity now is greater than ever.

Although our network is larger than either TSM or Screentonic (700m monthly impressions vs. 225m for TSM and 80m for Screentonic), we are a relatively young company (just under a year and a half old) and we feel we have a great deal more to do. We are also certainly not short on either funds or ideas for how our service and the space in general can improve.

So, the point is, in case you were wondering ... we're not planning on going anywhere. We're having too much fun just doing what we're doing.

- omar

two billion

2007-04-13T15:42:00.000-07:00

We've come to the next major milestone. It has not been that long since we hit the one billion mark on Jan 26th. Things continue to accelerate and our advertisers and publishers continue to come up with creative and innovative solutions to grow the mobile web. The most exciting part of all this is just seeing all the new and interesting solutions that they have produced. We certainly have never seen this level of activity in the mobile web.

So things are good, and getting better... I'm going to go out on a limb and make a prediction on when we hit 3B... actually nevermind... let's see how good you guys are because I suck at predicting. So far I've been way off every time I've tried :) Feel free to submit your own guess as to what date we cross the 3B mark in the comments below.

- Omar

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

2007-04-09T15:44:00.000-07:00

The mobile advertising industry really needs to agree upon a few things. The most important area to agree upon is how we measure and report all these numbers we quote. AdMob will be passing 2 billion ad impressions served at the end of this week. What does that really mean?

More importantly, is there any standard way of measuring this vs the other players in the industry? Also, what’s the difference between ad impressions served and available impressions. And what does reach mean in mobile? How should we think about unique users? And how do we measure them? None of this is standardized, either in the definitions themselves or in the third party methods by which these numbers can be validated.

I’m not saying our way is right, but in the interest of transparency its worth looking at what we are doing. I can say for AdMob we look at the world like this.

Ad impressions served are ads that we actually serve. Showing different ads is one way to generate impressions, but showing the same ad multiple times leads to more impressions as well. So we will have served 2B actual ad impressions to actual phones as of late this week. We currently serve approximately 600M ad impressions per month.

Available impressions are ad impressions that we could have served. Like most ad networks AdMob does not have a 100% fill rate, currently it is at around 75%. This means that our available impressions number stands at 850M / month. We also call this number "monthly pageviews" since the pageviews are ultimately where the available impressions come from.

The next number people throw around is "unique users". This one is tricky, because it is not always easy to measure unique users in mobile. We'd be very interested to learn how others are arriving at their numbers, and see if there is a way to standardize on what a unique user is in mobile.

The MMA guidelines have a basic start, but are not yet complete in their definition. For example the 2006 MMA guidelines state, “Every mobile phone user has some sort of alpha and/or numeric code (not personal subscriber data like name or phone number) that is sent with each ad request. These unique identifiers are used to determine how many ‘unique users’ view each ad.”

That’s pretty much all it says about unique users, and it is not exactly true. You cannot find these identifiers in all cases, and certainly not worldwide. Based on using only this technique, a large number of users would be unidentifiable. This is one small example but our industry does contain any number of similar issues.

Now let me be the first to say that this is certainly not a complaint about the MMA or any other standards organization. If anything, it is AdMob’s responsibility to get more involved and help contribute to the great work that they are doing. Rather, it’s just a wake up call to all of us that there is still work to be done.

At the end of the day, we all have to be open and explain what our numbers mean and how we are getting at them. The more the industry as a whole is trusted as being reliable, the better it will be for all the players involved: advertisers, publishers, and users.

Where things stand (really)

2007-02-24T16:33:00.000-08:00

There has a been a lot of excitement about mobile advertising recently. All of us are very happy that things are finally moving. AdMob has been on the front page of the WSJ and was featured as one of the "Next Net 25" in Business 2.0. Other companies in the mobile advertising space have been getting tons of attention as well.

There are many individuals in both the mobile and the advertising space who are calling for some conservatism when it comes to how we think about mobile advertising today. I think that makes a great deal of sense. A recent article by Fred Ghahramani, the CEO of AirG, breaks it down quite well. While I don't agree with everything he says, his sentiment certainly rings true.

(i got the chart idea from here)

Ultimately billions of impressions does not equal billions of dollars. While I can say for sure that mobile advertising is light years ahead of where it was last year, we shouldn't get ahead of ourselves, either. The last thing this industry needs is a standard hype cycle (tm) --Don't worry Gartner, check is on the way-- in which 12 months from now everyone is disappointed that their voice and data charges are still not completely subsidized by advertising. We would do well to remember that worldwide the wireless carriers bring in 1.2 trillion (with a "t") dollars in revenue. Advertising online is still "only" a 16 billion dollar industry. Obviously, even if mobile advertising spend were as large as it is online, it would still be three zeros short of solving that problem.

What I can say for sure, however, is that mobile advertising is happening in a very real way today. It will, in fact, be an industry measured in the billions (of dollars) in the not too distant future. It will change the way much of the content we consume on our phones is monetized, and it will serve as a catalyst for change in the mobile landscape as a whole. The business of mobile advertising has in every way exceeded our expectations (we 6x'd our 2006 predictions) and it is an industry that can exceed the market's expectations as well, as long as we can keep those expectations within reason.

- omar

Next Net

2007-02-22T22:25:00.000-08:00

Cool! AdMob was selected as one of the Next Net 25 by Business 2.0. That was very kind of them. Other notables from the list: Spotrunner, Loopt, and StumbleUpon.

one billion

2007-01-26T21:02:00.000-08:00

Just sent this email out to the team... figured I'd share up here as well:

----------------------

So here we are, one billion later. We passed the billion mark at 9:21pm and don't worry, we stuck around to ring the gong (three times). I know we've been saying it took us a year, but if you think about it it actually took us much less. We served only 30 million ads in our first six months. You can actually check out the waybackmachine capture of the site back in late May to see where we were (and what we looked like). So if you think about it, 970 million of the billion happened in the last six months, which is an unbelievable number.

This milestone means a lot to me personally, and it means a great deal to us as a company. It's really a testament to all the hard work each and every one of you has put in. It's a rare pleasure in our industry to work on something that ends up with significant traction, and I'm just happy to be a part of it. I look forward to the days when a billion doesn't seem like such a big deal! :)

Way to go AdMob!

- Omar

----------------------------

WSJ Front Page! (Happy Birthday AdMob)

2007-01-17T22:50:00.000-08:00

In case you are wondering if it really makes much of a difference to be featured on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, I can tell you it does.

Phones, email, etc... have been non stop since the article was published today.

We were even fortunate enough to get interviewed by the Journal in video form:

[Source WSJ]

What's more, this all came just one day before our first birthday (I sent the note offically launching AdMob to the SV MoMo list on January 18th, 2006) giving us quite a bit to be happy about.

I've said it before but I'll say it again because it's simply the truth: The real credit here belongs with all of the hundreds of forward thinking companies that have been willing to work with us to push this entirely new medium to the next stage. They are not just the driving force behind AdMob, but the force behind a major shift in mobile that many of us have been waiting for for some time.

Going forward there will be some changes when it comes to how we think and speak about the market. We will no longer focus on simply trying to explain that mobile advertising is “big”. Rather, we will focus on answering: “So what? I understand that this is ‘big’, but what does this mean for my business, my products, and my plans in mobile? How do you protect the user experience, and how do you make sure you get the right ad in the right place?”

In the end, this article does make a difference; and not just because of the attention. For us, it’s a milestone. We’ve turned an idea into a business, and helped to energize a market that lay largely dormant. But now the stakes are higher… we must take our business and scale it dramatically (without breaking it), and we must take this market and help it to become a serious industry. Whatever the outcome, I can tell you with some conviction (and those who know me know I’m not known for hyperbole) that we've only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to mobile advertising; there are much bigger and better things to come.

What does the iPhone mean for AdMob?

2007-01-09T19:31:00.000-08:00

On the off chance that you currently live under a rock and your only connection to the outside world is a web browser that will not navigate to any page other than this blog, I should tell you that Apple just launched the iPhone. Needless to say, it looks like a very impressive device. I couldn’t be more excited about it and several people on both our product and engineering teams have already decided that it will be critical for us to get several for “testing” just as soon as they come out.

In fact... I was excited about it in late 2004 when in true mobile geek fashion I put together this fake commercial for it (they clearly did a better job with the device than I would have)

The iPhone does, however, beg the question: What does this mean for AdMob and mobile advertising in general? It can’t be good, right? The argument goes like this: The iPhone has a full featured web browser. If people are experiencing the full featured web, they’ll be experiencing full featured web ads. Therefore specialized mobile ad networks will no longer be relevant. Even if Apple only achieves their stated goal of 1% market share, other handset manufacturers will quickly begin to include similar functionality on their devices and soon enough the need for mobile ad networks will disappear.

It’s a worthwhile argument, and one that I thought about for some time even before AdMob was launched. Of course, I get paid to be biased, so here are a couple of reasons why I believe this argument to be false:

1. This is not the first phone to browse full HTML

I love Steve Jobs (in a totally platonic way) as much as anyone, but once I finished watching his presentation and exited his famous reality distortion field I remembered that this is not the first device to support full HTML browsing. Plenty of Windows, Symbian, and other smart-phones (as well as Sidekicks) ship with “full-featured” HTML browsers while Opera opens up this type of browsing to an even broader range of devices.

2. Mobile UIs are still mobile UIs

Just because a device can browse the web, it doesn’t mean that users will ultimately find this to be the optimal experience. It’s important to note that when Steve Jobs showed off both Yahoo! email as well as the Google Maps, in neither case did he go to Safari and type in the URL for those services. He showed off specialized apps, with specialized UI’s. In addition, the up-down-left-right type of panning required to actually read a web page on these types of devices will prove to be cumbersome over time. In more advanced markets, such as Japan, where a number of devices are capable of full HTML browsing, the mobile sites that people actually use are those sites that have been specially developed for mobile. HTML/cHTML/WAP is not really the point… no matter the technology, in order for a service/site to succeed on mobile, some consideration must be given to the UI (and quite frankly, the ads that sit in that UI).

3. Mobile advertisers still want to reach mobile devices

There are a whole set of advertisers that benefit greatly from the ability to reach people specifically on their mobile device. Using services like AdMob, these advertisers have been able to reach a user-base that was previously inaccessible. Full featured browser or not, there will continue to be a distinct and real value for advertisers in reaching consumers directly on their device. If they are once again limited to simply advertising on “the web”, this advantage will be lost.

4. Web based advertisers may NOT want to reach mobile devices

When you advertise online, you expect to reach a set of users sitting in front a PC, with all that that entails. In some cases, you may simply want to provide them with information regarding your product or service, but in many cases you will be intending to sell them something or be seeking more direct action on their part. It is likely that a user on their phone won’t be willing to go through the same type of browsing-shopping cart-checkout process that they would be willing to go through on their PC. If it begins to happen en-masse, ultimately you may be rather upset that you’re paying for clicks or impressions that in some cases aren’t showing up in an environment where they are the most actionable.

5. It is one more device

This is probably the most important reason of all. The entire reason mobile ad networks are needed is that there are so many devices, and carriers, and formats of content, etc… that it is difficult for an advertiser to reach consumers in a consistent fashion, or for publishers to reach out to the advertiser community effectively. The fragmentation of the market is the essential stumbling block that we seek to address. The iPhone and other devices like it are going to push us to scale our technology in new ways, as well as provide us with some powerful new ways to keep our ads relevant and user friendly.

So, ultimately, if the iPhone and other devices like it become prevalent, it’s going to be a very good thing for us… and we’ll definitely make sure to pick up a few for “testing” just to be certain.

- Omar

the net is flat

2006-12-01T23:08:00.000-08:00

Just saw this news.

As it turns out, 3 is finally introducing flat rate data in the UK. And whats more, Hutchison (3's owner) plans to roll out the flat rate data plans across the group's eight other 3G markets early next year. This will be a great and long awaited catalyst for the expansion of the mobile web in those markets.

Needless to say, we couldn't be happier.

500M served

2006-11-30T08:19:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone, this is Mike, product manager here at AdMob. As you may have noticed on our website, we just hit 500 million ads served, which rocks. It's also a reminder that we still have a lot of work to do, and we can't do it alone. To our advertisers and publishers: your suggestions and input help us build a better service, so keep it coming! Whether you're running an ad campaign or monetizing a mobile website, we're committed to giving you as much control and transparency as possible along the way. There are some exciting new features in the works, so stay tuned....

new ad management features for publishers

2006-11-28T17:56:00.000-08:00

Hey folks. This is Mark, lead developer for AdMob’s web applications. Based on feedback received from our publishers, we developed several new advertising management features.

We added two options to the “edit site” page (also available when creating a new site). First, publishers now have the option of running ads categorized as Age Appropriate. These are ads that our team feels are best targeted at viewers 16 or older, such as ads for dating and personals sites, or ads for sites that are “PG-13” oriented. We still prohibit any adult and mature content. (Check the content guidelines for a complete rundown: http://www.admob.com/content_guidelines.php)

Second, publishers can manage specific ad categories. Most should still opt-in to all categories to maximize revenue, but you can now remove specific categories rather than managing each ad individually.

By default, all existing publishers have been set to receive Age Appropriate ads, as well as ads for all categories. If you prefer to change these settings, please login and click “My Sites” then “edit site”.

The AdMob team will apply the category and rating as part of our existing moderation process. We will probably allow advertisers to directly select specific categories during the ad creation process early next year.

We hope these changes allow you to optimize the type of advertisements running on your site, as well as make the advertisements more relevant for your users. Please send any feedback to support@admob.com.

Later,

Mark

going, going, gong

2006-11-04T21:59:00.000-08:00

So we just hit 300M ads served. For those that are counting, we added 100M impressions in the last 17 days. While that is wonderful, by far the most important thing I have to write about is the recent addition to our office. In keeping with our "Asian fusion" office theme, we picked up a Wuhan gong with a Bodhi tree stand. Some people ring the bell for a sale; at AdMob, we gong.

Happy 200th

2006-10-17T14:18:00.000-07:00

We served our 200 millionth ad today! Exciting stuff. The more exciting part is that it took us about 7 months to serve our first 100 million ads, and only 7 weeks to serve the next 100 million. I guess our next major milestone will be to serve 100 million ads each week. That's gonna take some doing...

the few, the proud, the mobbers

2006-09-16T10:29:00.000-07:00

CTIA was awesome. We had great traffic at our table during MECCA, and we spent the next two days in our meeting room (which had a totally ghetto projection screen made out of a table cloth) lining up some pretty incredible stuff with some amazing companies.

So that's the good side. The challenge is that thanks to an overwhelming amount of interest in AdMob, especially after CTIA, we are finding ourselves pretty well under water. Things are scaling much faster than anticipated, and we need some help. Check out our jobs page for details. Two tips on applying.

1. We're looking for superstars.
2. Actually, that's it. Superstars.

funding

2006-09-07T11:32:00.000-07:00

So, we finally announced our funding. It's pretty exciting stuff, and we're thrilled to have the backing of a firm like Sequoia as we push forward into a market that promises to be both lucrative and volitile. So much has already happened for our young company, but I feel like this announcement really marks the beginning of a new phase for us.

AdMob has already shown the tremendous potential of the mobile advertising market. Now we have to continue to grow and innovate in the market, so that our publishers and advertisers can take full advantage of that opportunity. On the subject of our publishers and advertisers, I should take a moment to thank all of you. Without your intiative and willingness to try something completely new, we wouldn't have made it to this point.

That's it for now, but there's more to come!

the plot thickens

2006-08-29T22:16:00.000-07:00

So, a few days ago, Google quietly introduced Google Mobile Ads to the US, UK, and Germany, extending the capability to buy AdWords on their mobile search results. Previously, it was available only in Japan.

In typical Google style, it looks like it should be a great advertising product. We were pretty excited to incorporate this into the AdMob Network, and yesterday we rolled out our contextual search channel. Now advertisers on AdMob can purchase contextual search inventory alongside the rest of their ad purchases.

Although the channel represents only a small amount of our inventory at present, we are confident that it will grow quickly, and we look forward to extending the channel with other providers of contextual search in the mobile space.

Obviously, Google's new product begs the question of competition with AdMob. We're certainly well aware of the competitive dynamics in the space, but all in all, we feel that this introduction will be a net positive for AdMob and the mobile advertising market as a whole. For a deeper discussion on Google, and what I was thinking a few months ago (which admittedly has evolved some).. you can check out this posting on the issue.

ooo, pretty

2006-08-07T20:52:00.000-07:00

You probably already noticed, but we just relaunched the site with a nice new look... hope you like it!!

reporting in

2006-07-27T17:53:00.000-07:00

Ah, some major stuff on the way, but we decided to push out some important upgrades early. The first is a spiffy new stats area, with charts, date filters, csv file downloads, and other goodies.

The other is that we broke up Asia on the targeting tree so that you can now hit specific countries.

That's all for today, but believe me, we've got some pretty significant coolness in the wings...

Oh, and by the way, speaking of stats, we seem to have about ~~150M~~ 200M pageviews a month of inventory right now... and inventory has been growing at a rate of 110% a month!

Some Big Changes

2006-06-30T15:31:00.000-07:00

So, we are diving in and starting to make a series of larger changes to the site. The first, and probably the most far reaching, is the organization of publisher sites in the AdMob network into ‘Channels’. Early feedback indicates that this has been either fantastic or really bad… we’re still trying to sort out which side is going to come out on top.

We did this for a number of reasons. Obviously, as the total number of sites continues to grow, some organizational scheme is necessary. Secondly, it has become somewhat difficult to run network-wide campaigns with all the clicking and bidding you have to do. Also, our advertisers would have to continually return to the site to see if there had been any new publishers who joined. With a growing network such as ours, having the ability to extend your campaign across a whole category is a welcome feature.

Of course, advertisers can still manage campaigns on a site by site basis. After advertising across a category, if a particular site is not performing, it can be easily removed from the campaign.

The last reason is related more to business needs than to usability. We’ve experience incredible growth… We launched about 5 months ago, and we’ve gone from zero to over 60M pageviews of inventory per month. With that kind of growth comes a great deal of interest, and unfortunately it seems there are several companies trying to emulate our success by simply mining our publisher list. Obviously that doesn’t bode well for anyone in the network.

So, that's the latest. If you have any feedback, feel free to comment below or just drop me a note directly (omar-at-admob-dot-com).

new stuff pt 2

2006-06-28T22:47:00.000-07:00

So we just rolled out bid compression.

From the what's new page:

"Now whenever you place a bid on AdMob, you can enter the highest amount you are *willing* to pay and AdMob will handle the rest. Rather than simply use that amount, the system will automatically bid the lowest amount possible (down to 50% of your bid price) to secure you the top position, up to your maximum bid. Since we now have bid compression, our old auto-bid feature is no longer needed.

When doing the bid compression, AdMob automatically takes into account all other bids that would be competing against yours on a case by case basis. It's really quite slick, and it should help our advertisers to make the most efficient use of their funds."

Next is categories for the publishers... we'll keep the good stuff coming.

new stuff - part 1

2006-06-15T13:34:00.000-07:00

We have been quietly adding some features to AdMob

transfer funds from your "pending earnings" to your "ad balance".
added "pause all" and "run all" for ads, so you don't have to click 80 times.
allow publishers to specify payment method (paypal, check)
and the biggy, you can now target by country in North America and western Europe
we also fixed some bugs, but if you didn't notice, we're not gonna tell you what they were :)

We should have more to report on shortly!

ad supported everything

2006-06-01T21:39:00.000-07:00

Ran across an interesting story on how Virgin Mobile is offering users free minutes for interacting with ads. We're starting to see the beginnings of what will probably be a long line of exploration into how ad support is going to fit in to the mobile economy. Good stuff.

A paragraph!

2006-05-25T11:05:00.000-07:00

Yes, first we had that sentence in business week, and now an entire paragraph in the Wall Street Journal. We are moving up in the world! I see big things for us now, entire articles perhaps.

getting down to business

2006-05-22T16:15:00.000-07:00

Well, we've finally made it out and started the process of settling in. There is a great deal to be done, but it looks like all the pieces are falling in to place to enable us to really start cranking. This next few months is going to be extremely interesting (and hopefully not in a "chinese proverb" kinda way).

the big move

2006-04-29T14:37:00.001-07:00

I know it's been awhile since I posted anything, but trust me, there is a lot going on in the background. Right now I'm just finishing up things in Philly. This will be my last week here; from now on AdMob will be based in Palo Alto, CA.

So for the next few weeks and months it's gonna be all about recruiting, building, and trying to make a great business. In any case, just wanted to drop a note to let you all know I'm still alive :)

20 Million

2006-04-17T15:49:00.000-07:00

I just sat on my computer and watched the counter tick past 20 million ad impressions. Unbelievable. It's only been 90 days since launch, and when this first went up I honestly expected to serve MAYBE 1 or 2 million ads in the first few months. Aside from the numbers, there are a lot of other good things in the works, including moving to Palo Alto to set up an office. So stay tuned everyone, we've barely scratched the surface.

we got researched!!! or something...

2006-04-16T16:53:00.000-07:00

Ok, I get excited about stupid things. But I'm super psyched right now! During one of my random searches for "AdMob" to see if Google was EVER going to list us as part of the search results instead of just all the sites that link to us, I found one of those really expensive industry reports and it actually includes AdMob! That's right, if you go to visiongain and search for the explosively titled report, "Mobile advertising and marketing: Market analysis and forecasts 2006-2011", you will find us listed in the "Competitive Landscape" section (It's easiest if you just use your browser to find "AdMob" on the page). How cool is that, we're not just on the map anymore, we're on the LANDSCAPE!

a sentence!

2006-03-24T14:59:00.000-08:00

Cool! AdMob got mentioned in Business Week. Granted, it was only one sentence, but hey, I'll take what I can get :)

45 days, 41 partner sites

2006-03-04T17:57:00.000-08:00

It's been awhile, and it will probably be another while until I get the chance to post again. Things have been hectic. I'm simply trying to keep up with everything, and trying to keep the servers alive under ever increasing load. AdMob is handling over 500,000 pageviews of inventory each day, and this means a few hundred thousand phones have to be matched against our database to find the ads that will work for them. As you can imagine, our poor servers are sweating...

And every day a few more partners sign up; it's great! Combine that with some exciting announcements we have coming down the pipe, and it looks like March is going to be a banner month. I'll be keeping you all posted but for now it's back to the grind.

30 days later

2006-02-18T14:33:00.000-08:00

Well, exactly 1 month ago today, AdMob was launched... I can certainly say that a whole lot has happened in that time, and I am looking forward to what's coming up next. I've been spending a lot of time working on the behind the scenes stuff, dealing with business plans and presentations and all that sort of fun (with help from some of my smartest peers at Wharton - insert mad props, shout outs, and whatever else the kids are doing these days).

Another cool thing happened today: AdMob got a great new logo. A very special thanks to Scott, who aside from being a busy MBA student, is obvioulsy pretty handy with Illustrator, if you ask me.

Old ugly logo:

New snazzy logo:

Get it?!?! The "b" is a phone!!! It's brilliant I tell you, brilliant!!!

a few bells and whistles

2006-02-06T18:03:00.000-08:00

So, there have been some new features added to AdMob in the past few days:

Auto Approve Ads: you can now auto approve ads for your sites, so you don't need to come back and approve ads one by one (as much fun as it might be).
Real Time Stats: On the stats pages, everything is coming in real time, so when you start an ad, you can see how its doing right away.
Multi-site Ad Buying: The ad market got a makeover. Now you can easily buy ads on many sites at once.

And here is some stuff that still needs to be done soon (very, very, abbreviated list)

Better Bid Infometrics: The top bid on a site doesn't mean much right now. This is because it could be highly targeted and not really relate to what you are intending to target. So for example, if a site has a top bid of .50 cents but the advertiser is only targeting Asia, then you would be just fine bidding .05 cents for the US. Also, because AdMob has intelligent ad rotation, your ad will still be given some rotation (although less than the top bidder) even if there is someone higher than you with the exact same target characteristics... All of this has to be messaged better so advertisers can make more informed purchases.
Auto Deposit: If you run out of funds, you should be able to specify an amount to be automatically charged and added to your account. This seems somewhat better than me hunting you down on Skype.
Run of Network Ads: You should be able to specify that an ad is "run of network", meaning that it should appear on all partner sites, both existing and future. That way, you don't have to come back and see if we have added new partners just so you can run your ad on their site as well.

Better Stat Slicing: You should be able to view stats by day and by week, not just by month. It's currently a bit hard to see how a new campaign is doing just because the data quickly blends in with the old one. And it would be really cool if you could see a breakdown of region and device among those users that did click on your ad.

Well there is the short list of stuff to do... Good news is, everything is humming along rather nicely even with our warts, and each day things seem to be getting just a bit better. By the way, if you think there is something that needs to be on the short list that I somehow missed, leave a comment and let me know.

Two Weeks!

2006-02-01T14:52:00.000-08:00

Well this is it... at exactly (or roughly exactly) this time two weeks ago, I sent the email out to the Mobile Monday list and officially launched AdMob.

So, how has it gone? Well, in the immortal words of Frank Barrone, "Holy Crap!". We've served millions of ads so far, and a few of our partners will soon be moving from testing out the service to running it site wide. The advertisers seem universally happy, so we're pretty good on that side as well.

On a separate note, I had an interesting discussion (or at least it was interesting to me) with Oliver over at MobileCrunch about the merits (or lack thereof) of mobile advertising. You can check it out here if you are into reading long email discussions.

Take it up a notch

2006-01-29T15:36:00.000-08:00

Well, things are humming along nicely. By my calculations, we're running at about 1.5M ad views / week. That’s not so bad, but there are some things in the works that I hope will take it up a notch, and turn that into a daily number instead of a weekly one. That being said, things are already far beyond my expectations, especially being just 11 days out. I just wanted to say that I’m thrilled and thankful to everyone, especially all of the publishers and advertisers who were willing to give this new service a chance.

There is another milestone coming up this week. We will have spent our first promotional dollars. That's right, I forked over some dough to sponsor the FierceWireless newsletter this week. I hope it will help to get the word out about AdMob, and bring in new possibilities for both publishers and advertisers. I’ll keep everyone posted, and here’s look forward to Wednesday, our two week anniversary!

Conspiracy Theory

2006-01-24T19:37:00.000-08:00

Ok, so I don't really believe this.. I think... but there are some strange happenings. Google won't list AdMob!!! That's right, you do a search for 'admob' on google, and you get all many of the blog postings about it... which all link to it, but you get NO result for AdMob!! If you do a search on link:www.admob.com the same thing happens!!

Yahoo! doesn't seem to have any trouble... MSN is fine... Oh, well I guess Google is just not as fast ... or are they too fast?!?! .. fade to twilight zone music.

WWGD?

2006-01-19T16:14:00.000-08:00

Yes, the time has come for me to answer that age old question that every aspiring entrepreneur doing anything even remotely close to technology must answer. WWGD? What Will Google Do (to you)? The thing is, everyone seems to ask this question as if it will come as a major shock to your system (come on, we’ve all done it). So let's get this over with. Google is a big bad (though certainly not evil) monster, and they are going to eat us all for lunch. Or maybe not...

The first thing to consider is simply that despite their general scariness, they simply cannot do everything. Plenty of companies will go on in their happy existence despite the fact that Google is around. Also, the fact of the matter is that the further they get away from their core competencies (Google video, anyone?), the less frightening they seem.

Now that may be all well and good, you say, but YOU are in Google's core business, not some far off remote space where they will not find you. YOU are in the one business Google derives 99% of their revenues from. YOU are in the business that has driven their 128 BILLION (with a B) dollar market cap (as of this writing). Perhaps you are right, perhaps they can not do everything and the rest of us are not in trouble. But you my friend, YOU are in deep trouble.

Now, I would be in a bit of a bad position at this point, because the fact of the matter is, you are pretty much right. Just because AdMob has taken online advertising mobile doesn't mean it’s far away enough to be hidden from the great eye (sorry for the LOTR reference, but I couldn't resist). In any case, let's be realistic. I'm fully aware that Google will enter the mobile advertising arena. I'm just not so sure that will be a bad thing for AdMob.

I think anyone who summarily dismisses the idea of AdMob simply because of Google’s impending entry is taking an overly simplistic view of the market. They would certainly have a very difficult time explaining the success (not Google-size success, but success nonetheless) of companies like AdBrite, well after both Google and Yahoo! had established their dominance in the mobile advertising space.

Let us pause for a moment and consider how, exactly, Google might enter the space. The logical thing for them to do would be to roll out their mobile advertising in the same way they did it on the web, first directly through their search engine results, then through partnering with other sites (i.e AdSense mobile).

The first step will be in developing a highly trafficked mobile search page. That step is currently underway. Next, when they decide the market will support it, they will begin to have sponsored results on their mobile search pages. This will be a watershed moment for AdMob. Suddenly thousands of advertisers will open their eyes to the possibility of advertising on the mobile web, and they will move to take advantage of it. They will build out mobile sites which can be promoted on Google (and they will finally have mobile sites to promote on AdMob as well.)

Next, Google will move to integrate their mobile ads with other sites. However, mobile integration is a bit more complex than cutting and pasting some javascript, so rather than try to work with just any mobile site, they will cut deals with very large content providers, such as news outlets and carriers. Notice, that despite the fact that they have greatly strengthened the mobile web, they have still not destroyed AdMob. In fact, they have only grown the market in which AdMob is playing. I do realize that when they enter the market, Google will begin to dictate the way the game is played. Their prices will represent the upper limit, when their click through rates get too high, advertisers will search for other options.

While all this is happening, AdMob will be plugging away, partnering with more publishers and making more advertisers happy. AdMob is in the same space as Google, but that space simply has room for more than a few players, especially if they are positioning themselves to serve different areas of the market. There is no doubt that Google will affect AdMob greatly, but it will be more as a price leader rather than the great Mongol hordes coming to kill our babies. So, there you have it. My two cents... and if I’m wrong, well, then, God help us all.

and so we launch...

2006-01-18T15:42:00.000-08:00

So today is the day of the official launch. All the pieces are in place, now I just need to start telling people about AdMob. In terms of the business, things are humming along. With the addition of high traffic partners such as GetJar, we now have over 40,000 clicks per day of inventory to fill, and advertisers are beginning to take up those slots.

I am hopeful that AdMob will eventually become a powerful equalizer on the mobile web and provide some much needed infrastructure. At the beginning, AdMob will allow producers of mobile products and services to reach a mobile audience quickly and easily, and it will enable content publishers to monetize their high traffic sites.

If all goes well, it will do more than that, and begin to act as an equalizing force, leveling the mobile playing field. Independent publishers will be able to expand and diversify their offerings, and independent producers of products and services will be encouraged to develop more creative and useful content. Once they have developed that content and gained traffic via their ads on AdMob, perhaps they will become publishers themselves.

By allowing a fair market to facilitate the exchange of products and content on the mobile web, AdMob can be a democratizing force. The world of mobile content need no longer be the sole domain of a few large companies.

That's the dream anyways, for now I will take it one day at a time, a few more publishers, then a few more advertisers, then repeat.

Time to get serious

2006-01-07T12:51:00.000-08:00

The holidays are over, and it was quite enjoyable.. (I hope it was for you as well).. So now it's time to get back to work on AdMob. We've had over a million ad impressions served since our soft launch but there are still a few things missing. The CC processing is not quite integrated, and we are just wrapping up work on our "MobPages".

MobPages will be easy to create mobile sites for advertisers who don't have their own mobile pages to link to. They will feature email collection forms as well as "click to call" links that will initiate a voice call from a user's mobile phone. We are really excited about the functionality and look forward to having it finished.

Soft Launch

2005-12-22T20:45:00.000-08:00

Well. It's done. To clarify "it" I will quote from our about us page:

"AdMob is the the world's first pay-per-click mobile advertising marketplace. We bring advertisers together with independent mobile content publishers to create value for all. Our mission is to help spur the growth of the open mobile web by providing value for advertisers and revenue for content publishers."

So AdMob has officially had its soft launch and our first pilot campaign is up and running. The good folks over at Orb Networks were kind enough to be our very first advertiser, and they seem to be pleased with their campaign. We're working feverishly to get some large content partners integrated with the service, and also setup the payment pages for advertisers... just a few more details and we'll be there!