AdMob ups ante in mobile ad fight

August 7, 2007 | Eric Eldon | Comments | |

admob.pngAdMob, a mobile ad provider, is announcing a string of partnerships that show it continues to grow even in the face of competition from Google, AOL and Yahoo.

We still don’t know how much money this company — or other mobile ad network companies — are making, but signs of a booming advertising market continue.

The San Mateo, Calif. company places advertising on web publisher’s sites on cell phones.

The company is announcing partnerships with major advertisers including Atlantic Records, Countrywide Home Loans (Click to Call), Electronic Arts (NCAA Football, Bejeweled), Echostar, JCPenney, Starbucks, Universal and a string of Microsoft properties, including MSN, Windows Mobile and xBox.

AdMob also serves ads for more than 2000 mobile web sites, including ESPN, CBS, Weather Underground, Maxim and Peperonity.

The market, for the biggest players, is looking good. Admob has served a worldwide total of one billion mobile ad impressions in June, for a total of over five billion since it launched eighteen months ago.

AOL Third Screen Media blogged that it had around 224 million impressions per month, but that was in early May.

Jupiter forecasts mobile advertising networks bringing in a total of $2.9 billion in 2011.

Julie Ask, a research director at Jupiter Research, says AdMob’s number is impressive, but not surprising. There are 230 million cell phone users in the US, and 35 million of them browse the Web, according to Ask.

She suggests the continued string of deals with large brands’ mobile sites are creating another wave of traffic.

Large companies like Yahoo, Google and AOL have an advantage because of their exiting large network of advertisers and publishers. In mobile ads, too, they’re able to sell targeted ads to specific web sites — sports, games, etc. In turn, they’re able to sell more lucrative advertising to these niche audiences. That puts the pressure on upstarts like AdMob, although AdMob has the benefit of backing from Sequoia and Accel (previous coverage), giving it some staying power.

Stephen Wellman at Information Week considers AdMob’s odds:

Advertisers have been eager to experiment with the third screen and AdMob successfully translated this desire into business success.

Despite this, I still have to question AdMob’s success. Is this a sign that AdMob has a killer business offering or that Google and Yahoo are too big and too slow to innovate?

I suspect it’s a combination of both. I give credit where credit is due. AdMob delivered. But, I suspect they know deep in the back of their minds that they should have lost already.

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About the Author, Eric Eldon

Eric currently covers digital media technology and business news, especially what's happening on social networks and their platforms. He also writes and edits stories about venture capital, and lots of other stuff, too. He started at VentureBeat in the spring of 2007, half a year or so after Matt Marshall left his reporting job at the San Jose Mercury News to found the site. Eric previously cofounded a startup called Writewith, that was building editorial software for newspapers and other groups of writers. The startup didn't work out, but he learned a lot.

  • mobile ads
    Any idea what's the CPM for these mobile ads? Thanks.
  • I've heard $25-$30 CPM for Third Stream, but haven't seen confirmation.
  • TSM (ThirdScreen) has CPM rates as high as $50.00. CPM rates for mobile is very high and lucrative business right now if you are dealing with TIER 1 brands. Me personally I am a fan of self-serve marketplaces for the smaller publisher and advertiser. :)
  • Jonathan Frate
    Surely you could have done your research before preaching all this optimism?

    Admob has an eCPM of less than 10 cents, and just because they 'serve 1 billion ads' in the month doesn't mean those are paid for ads. They operate on a CPC model, and many of the publishers and advertisers are really seedy spammers.
  • Manik Khanna
    4info provides footer text message advertising on the text alerts that they send out. They are charging a $50 CPM. Would be interesting to see how much traffic they're driving.
  • @Jonathan Frate. Is this your first-hand knowledge, or are you referencing another source?

    Like I said in the post, Admob isn't providing its revenue numbers.

    Your criticism of the company may be fair, but based on the data from Jupiter -- and other sources -- the mobile ad market is growing fast, which is some cause for optimism.
  • Jonathan Frate
    Eric -


    This is first hand knowledge.

    Log into Admob. Create an account. Deposit 100$, and try to buy some ads for as cheap as you can.

    Then work the math backwards... and you'll see what I'm talking about the effective CPM's

    But the more important point is not the eCPM, it's the fact that admob operates on a Cost Per Click model. So it doesn't matter how many 'ads are served'. Serving ads is free in a CPC model... so...what's the hoopla?

    If they operated on a CPM model they could brag about hte ads served.

    If they're operating on a CPC model, they sohuld be doing a press release about the paid clicks generated...

    capiche?
  • Full disclosure, I am VP Marketing @ AdMob. I wanted to reply to Jonathan's posts about AdMob CPM and advertisers. These are really important questions.

    First - AdMob's Banner CPM ranges from $15 to $25. AdMob's CPC Marketplace is currently clearing at about $0.25 in the US and .25 in the UK.

    Second - AdMob served over 1Billion advertiser purchased ads in July.

    Third - AdMob actively screens every advertisement according to our policies which are more strict than most online ad options. In the last few weeks, we have served ads for Coca Cola, Geico, Starbucks, Reuters, 4 hollywood studios, JCPenney, Procter and Gamble, MTV, VH1, EA, MSN and hundreds of others including innovative but not abusive mobile players.

    We are proud of the advertising community we've built.

    Thanks for the discussion. All. Hope this data answers some of the questions. Jason
  • Jonathan Frate
    Jason -


    I'm glad that you've posted here.

    For full disclosure, I make a living playing the affiliate marketing game and i've been trying the mobile stuff the past 6 months and i was at first really excited about admob! I'm an affiliate for a lot of the ringtone companies, and I thought admob would be a good alternate way to monatize on my traffic.

    Now that i've tried it, I'm less excited, and I think admob should stop spreading the empty hype and let the numbers do the talking.


    Some points:

    1. "First - AdMob’s Banner CPM ranges from $15 to $25. "

    CPM is a non starter. What % of the billion ads served were CPM vs. CPC? My guess is 95%+ is CPC. Everyone knows you guys are a cpc shop, that's the BEAUTY of your system. Don't distract the conversation with this.



    2. "AdMob’s CPC Marketplace is currently clearing at about $0.25 in the US and .25 in the UK."

    What does that mean? "clearing?" Sure on the high end, maybe 1% of the ads that are resulting in payouts in the 25 cent range, but c'mon, BE HONEST! everyone knows admob is all about the cheap clicks. Look at the blogs on your own admob forum:

    http://forum.admob.com/viewtopic.php?t=144

    most of my traffic is in the usa and is converting at MUCH MUCH lower than 25 cents. I"ve talked to others and they've reached the same conclusion.

    In fact, I"m now using admob to buy up cheap traffic in the usa, and get my affiliate payouts from ringtone affiliate programs. I've been mostly a net buyer the past 2 months because i figured out it's impossible to make money on the CPC side inside admob, and it's really easy to buy 1-2 cent clicks in the USA through admob. what someone needs to build is a scaled up CPM business in the usa that's just as easy to use as admob but also has scale. so far nobody has built this. OR what admob needs to do is increase the minimum bid price and hold the line. But I'm sure this goes against the 'growth' that admob is trying to show in 'ads served' which is a meaningless metric for a CPC business.



    3. "Second - AdMob served over 1Billion advertiser purchased ads in July."

    What does that *MEAN*. I can "purchase" 1 ad, and you can serve it 1000 times for the same cost it took me to "PURCHASE" it.

    Are you trying to intentionaly mislead publishers? or is this an accident?

    OR are you saying you SERVED 1 billion PURCHASED CLICKS in July!?!? If so, then I owe you an apology.
  • Jonathan Frate
    I guess I'm not gonna get a response on this from admob. They've now taken the link to this article off the front of their website.

    Nice...
  • Max
    VentureBeat thanks for this post!
  • Evan
    Jonathan-

    Care to do some consulting?
  • AdMob is currently a number 1 choice for mobile publishers.