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Mobile Ad network AdMob gets funding from Sequoia Capital
By Vivek Puri | September 7th, 2006 at 11:21 pm ET
AdMob online mobile ad network, competitor to Google Mobile Advertising, announced today that it has received Series A funding from Sequoia Capital. Jim Goetz of Sequoia Capital, and Maynard Webb, former COO of eBay, has joined AdMob board of directors. The company was founded by Omar Hamoui in early 2006 is located in San Francisco peninsula, California. AdMob claims its network generates over 250 million page views per month. This is an interesting development in Mobile advertising space given the launch of Google Mobile Adwords Testing in US, UK, and Germany, which I had written about yesterday.
AdMob serves pay-per-click advertising on mobile web pages. AdMob for publishers, unlike Google Adsense, is transparent about the revenue split between AdMob and Publishers. AdMob Publishing partners will get 75 percent and Source partners will get 60 percent of the ad revenue. AdMob partners serving exclusively selling AdMob ads on their mobile sites qualify as Publishing partners and are required to provide links from their website back to AdMob for interested advertisers. Ad source partners source ads from AdMob but do not necessarily use AdMob ads exclusively. Publishers can control which ads appear on their mobile pages before they run.
As for buying ads, AdMob has bidding system in place, just like Google Adwords. Minimum bid that can be placed for is $.05. Ads can also be placed by geographic region, device manufacturer, platform, and capability level. Advertisers can control on which all AdMob partner sites they would like to advertise.
The idea of providing links back to AdMob for interested Publishers doesn’t appeal to me. Not everyone who views web pages from mobile is interested in placing ads. I think not even 1% of their total viewers might be looking to advertise or even need to advertise in the first place. So why force rest of the 99% people view irrelevant text on an already crowded and tiny mobile screen?
AdMob site is pretty basic as compared to Google Adwords/Adsense, especially on the reporting and stats side. But AdMob has still time to grow and provide a second front in Mobile Advertising. Positive news from AdMob is that big time advertiser eBay Wireless is actively participating in its ad network. AdMob is the company to watch out for in Mobile Ad war.
Updated: Thanks Omar for correcting me. Thats what happens when you write a post late at night. I had visited one of the mobile sites in your network, News0r.com, during the day and remember seeing only the banner ad. Later, reading through AdMOb FAQ’s got me double minded, and i thought you guys were referring to mobile website. Anyway, i have made the correction now.
Links:
AdMob
Tags: StartupSquad, adwords, adsense, web2.0, web_2.0, AdMob
on September 8th, 2006 at 3:41 am
Hello, thanks for the writeup! Just one small note. We don’t require publishers to provide links back from their mobile site; like you said, there is not enough room. We ask them to provide links back from their web site so that interested parties can advertise on their mobile site. Thanks again!
on November 13th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
[…] For monetizing it’s services, Mojeo adds an advertisement(using Admob) to the top of your website list every time you browse your list. As for competing services, if you look at the overall click count between 4info.net’s mobile application and Mojeo’s web app, Mojeo does save you few clicks when you want to reach the right content without setting up your location. […]
on December 30th, 2006 at 11:22 am
[…] Comparing this to mobile advertising space, which has also started picking up from 2006, I am amazed at the growth of Admob. Admob has served more than 734 million mobile ad views in around 1 year of its existence. I think we have yet to come across such a formidable player in the RSS industry. Given the fact that RSS is getting integrated with Outlook, already being integrated with Thunderbird, and other feed consumption tools from major companies like Google, I expect more mainstream RSS adoption. Number of people believe that widgets might overshadow RSS adoption, which will definitely be tested in 2007. Personally I think RSS will continue to grow more on the corporate side, while personal users will tend to use widgets. This in turn means that an increased number of publishers will be looking to monetize their content on either platform. […]
on January 4th, 2007 at 4:51 pm
[…] Here we have the mad scramble happening in the mobile-advertising space when most of the consumers don’t have access to low priced data plans, true 3G speeds, and WiFi enabled phones, in the first place. Overall mobile advertising is getting just too much attention compared to the number of subscribers, current usage, and content available be viewed/consumed by the users. Besides the well funded startups including AdMob, JumpTap, MillennialMedia, Actionality, ThirdScreenMedia, we also have mobile operators ad networks coming up from the likes of Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and traditional media advertising companies including Google and Yahoo gearing up to serve fresh ads to non-existent consumers. […]
on March 6th, 2007 at 9:59 am
[…] Currently Admob is leading the mobile ad delivery platform with over 1.4 billion ad impressions served. Google, Yahoo, Verizon, Sprint, At&t, JumpTap, MillennialMedia, Actionality, ThirdScreenMedia are just some of the companies operating in this space. […]
on March 26th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
[…] Admob today announced that it has raised another $15 million in funding. This was series Series B round for the mobile advertising startup which had raised $4 million in its Series A in September last year. The investment round was led by Accel Partners, with participation from existing investor Sequoia Capital. […]