Google announced today it would acquire mobile display ad serving platform AdMob for $750M in stock. AdMob is a 3-year-old San Mateo-based startup founded by Omar Hamoui. AdMob is a mobile advertising firm serveing ads on mobile websites and applications. It’s current clients include Ford Motors, Coca-Cola, Electronic Art, Procter & Gamble, MTV Europe, Adidas AG and Paramount Pictures.
This might turn out to be a risky gamble by Google as it tries to prevent competitor from entering the mobile advertising domain by overpaying for AdMob. It’s estimated that AdMob’s current revenue is $45 to $68 millions per year. However, Google currently already owns a major stake in mobile advertising with DoubleClick Mobile unit.
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Online advertising will continue to grow despite economic woes according to the latest analysis from eMarketer.
The majority of analyst firms expect to see spending growth for online advertising to continue to show double-digit increases in 2008 and 2009.
Globally, 91 percent of marketers are using online advertising, according to a McKinsey & Co survey of 340 senior marketing executives. Over half (55%) said they plan on cutting spending on traditional media in order to focus on Internet advertising.
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YouTube
For the first time, video downloads generated from Google’s YouTube site are no longer 100% free. Rather surprisingly, though, users have greeted the new links to fee-based music and content largely with positive comments, if any.
Google-owned YouTube yesterday abandoned its traditional business model of free content provider, adding links to paid video and audio in such a slick manner that most users either didn’t mind or didn’t even notice.
In a blog post Tuesday, “The YouTube Team” mapped out YouTube’s plans to ultimately evolve into sort of an online shopping mall for audio, video, and print entertainment.
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U.S. Internet advertising revenues for the first half of 2008 were $11.5 billion, reaching another half -year record that represents a 15.2 percent increase over the first half of 2007, according to the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).
The second quarter of ‘08 was up 12.8 percent over the same period in 2007 and showed a small decline of 0.3 percent from the first quarter.
Search and Display-related advertising continue to set records. Search revenues totaled almost $5.1 billion for the first half of the year, an increase of 24 percent from the $4.1 billion for the same period in 2007.
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Google is no longer suggesting that you should be listed in relevant directories. In fact, they’ve even removed the suggestion from their webmaster guidelines, as Brian Ussery noticed. The page used to have bullet points for:
- Have other relevant sites link to yours.
- Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.
Those points are now gone in what would appear to be a slap in the face of directories, but SEO folks are the ones really irritated. Google doesn’t appear to see it as a slap in the face so much, but more of simply a non-needed guideline.
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Sony Computer Entertainment America and Europe have announced another partnership in the PlayStation’s growing advertising platform.
In October, Sony Computer Entertainment America announced it had formed a division strictly for developing in-game advertisements for all of the PlayStation platforms, including the PlayStation Network.
Early in June, Sony announced its first dynamic advertising partner would be IGA Worldwide to provide in-game advertisements, with a special focus on Home.
This week, both SCEA and SCEE announced a partnership with Double Fusion, the same company that yesterday announced a deal with Yahoo for its upcoming free ad-supported games.
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Playing a little bit of catch-up to rival Google, Microsoft announced the acquisition of Navic Networks on Wednesday, giving it a foothold in the television advertising business.
The interactive TV advertising market has been considered a “new and burgeoning” industry for well over a decade now, and for perhaps all of that time, Microsoft has been working to gain a competitive position there. But this morning’s announced acquisition of interactive ad platform provider Navic Networks is being perceived as a catch-up play with Google, whose recent deal with Dish Network has been the talk of the industry.
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Blog-focused advertising networks are all the rage right now, with both Federated Media and Glam pulling down big valuation financing rounds in the last few months based very early growth metrics. Other startups, like Six Apart, have launched their own blog advertising networks as well.
As we predicted, Technorati now joins them with the launch of Technorati Media later this morning (the site will be password protected until 9 am PST today), their own blog advertising network. This comes just a couple of days after news leaked of their new round of financing.
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One of the great things about digital TV and a personal video recorder (PVR) is the ease with which you as a viewer can wholly control what you watch.
With the exception of the news, I rarely watch TV as it’s broadcast. Instead, I programme the PVR to record things that I might want to watch, and then watch it when I have time.
Of course, one thing I always do when watching a recorded programme is skip through the ads.
That behaviour is pretty consistent among everyone I know who uses a PVR.
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Warner Bros. TV has announced that it has signed deals to have its content distributed on WB-branded channels on Dailymotion, Joost, Sling Media, TiVo and Veoh Networks.
Each channel will include content from TheWB.com and KidsWB.com as well as other series that are currently not distributed online. The studio did not reveal the series as of yet however.
The new channels will launch in mid-September and will join current studio channels on AOL and Comcast’s Fancast. The company noted that popular social networking site Facebook has an application for WB content as well.
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