Care to do some consulting?

Nice…

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.

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

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?

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.