Google announced Monday it is buying smartphone ad specialty firm AdMob in a 750-million-dollar stock deal.
The acquisition will help the Internet search company to speed up efforts to develop more effective tools for creating and placing mobile ads on smart phones and other devices.
"Mobile advertising has enormous potential as a marketing medium and while this industry is still in the early stages of development, AdMob has already made exceptional progress in a very short time," said Google vice president of product management Susan Wojcicki.
Google also recently reported some mobile ad stats:
iPhone and Android users browse the Internet more often than anyone else [Morgan Stanley], contributing to Google’s 5x mobile search growth over the past two years
And a quarter of these same iPhone and Android users spend nearly 90 minutes per day using applications on their devices [AdMob]
As noted in the stats, Google is doing well in mobile search (though there’s still plenty of competition).
According to the official info site put up by Google to coincide with their acquisition of AdMob, the deal
- will bring new innovation and competition to mobile advertising, and
- will lead to more effective tools for creating, serving, and analyzing emerging mobile ads formats.
will benefit developers, publishers, and advertisers by improving the performance of mobile advertising, and will provide users with more free or low-cost mobile apps.
- will make the mobile ad space remain highly competitive, with more than a dozen mobile ad networks. The deal is similar to mobile advertising acquisitions that AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo have made in the past two years.
