updated
AdMob, which says it has the largest ad platform for mobile phones, has raised $15 million in a second round of financing led by Silicon Valley’s venture firm Accel Partners, and including existing investor Sequoia Capital.
AdMob, of San Mateo, Calif., has served more than 1.6 billion ads in less than a year, and says that is more than any other player, including Third Screen Media, a Boston-based competitor that AOL is reportedly in talks to acquire (see WSJ).
But it isn’t clear whether AdMob is king. It says it served more than 600 million ads in Feb and March combined, an impressive acceleration from the 1 billion ads during the entire second half of last year. However, Third Screen says it shows about 350 million ads every month (we haven’t confirmed this, but this is what it tells the WSJ), suggesting it may be bigger. Third Screen has also announced major customers, from Fox News to Ford Motor Co. AdMob, by contrast, serves smaller companies.
[Update: We wonder if anyone is holding the companies to the fire on their stats. We've just seen a reference at Third Screen's own site to a mere 175 million impressions served.]
The mobile ad trend is just taking off. AdMob has 1200 publishers using it, across 160 countries. Despite this, it isn’t profitable yet. AdMobs lets advertisers target things like geography, behavior, demographics and handset manufacturer.
Other mobile ad start-ups include Ad Infuse, Enpocket, Millennial Media and Rhythm NewMedia. Google and Yahoo, the ad giants of Silicon Valley, serve ads alongside their mobile search ads, but have yet to roll out more general mobile ads.
4 Comments
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Sanjaya said:
I’ve been a large customer of both Third Screen and Admob. Admob likely does serve more impressions, though many are oversees (especially Africa and Asia) and thus not worth much to buyers right now. While Third Screen is a larger, more established and quality company, AdMob is just absolutely kicking their butts. They have a very smart and far more nimble team. Congrats to Omar!
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Julia K said:
I’ve just switched over to AdMob, though I can’t compare it with Third Screen yet. We’re still only running text ads, no banners. We’ve got a mobile product, so it makes sense that we do very well on AdMob, but I didn’t expect such a discrepancy between AdMob and all of the web-based networks. It also beats Google Mobile so far.
We’re talking about average CPCs that are approx 1/10 of what they are on Google/Yahoo. CPAs that can’t be touched on any of those networks. CTRs that are actually 10-20 times better…
If you have a mobile product, it’s utterly ridiculous not to use AdMob.
Customer service is also of an absolutely higher quality than any of the other networks- especially Yahoo. I hope that they continue to improve as they get bigger.
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clau m said:
More than one billion ads but no reveue yet…I will never call that a success. The kings of advertising Google and yahoo are already on board. Will the fact these companies hold the inventory of billions of dollars will end up these wanna be kings? Absolutely! This is been a small momentum they have benefit from (just to make noise) but is over. 15 million of funding will allow them to print some more flyers and that’s it. Who in this world will want to have another ad platform aside from where you track the 80% of your web/mobile web media buys? Marketing folks?
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