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Apple buys Quattro Wireless in response to Google buying AdMob

Max — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 15:40:39 +0000

Today Quattro Wireless officially announced that Apple has acquired it. The details are not clear yet, but it seems that the price tag was $275 million. With about $30 million in funding, this is yet another impressive exit for an advertising mediation agency!

Andy Miller – Vice President of Mobile Advertising have sent this email this morning:

We are thrilled to let you know that Apple has acquired Quattro. We want to share with you our excitement about this news and what it means for our customers.
We have built our business by enabling advertisers to reach the right consumers across the mobile web and in applications. We remain focused on delivering more engaging, relevant and useful ads to mobile devices, and improving the measurement and execution of digital campaigns. Together with Apple, we look forward to developing exciting new opportunities in the future that will benefit our customers.

Waltham, Mass.-based Quattro has raised close to $30 million from two main venture investors–Highland Capital Partners and Globespan Capital Partners. Founded several years ago, its clients include Ford (F), Disney (DIS) and the National Football League

You probably remember the recent Google purchase – AdMob. AdMob is considered the largest mobile advertising network. Purchase of Quattro Wireless by Apple seems to be a fire back to Google, but is it really? It is rumored that Apple was actually first to bid on AdMob, but was upper handed by Google at the eleventh hour.

This deal goes through just hours from Google announcing its new phone developed with HTC – Nexus One, which will go on sale through Google website for rumored $530 as well as subsidized by T-Mobile for $180 for 2 year personal contract (no family/prepaid or other plans…. ehh…)

Those are definitely interesting times. Mobile advertising is buzzing.

Mojiva – a new promising player in Mobile Advertising

Max — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 18:39:29 +0000

Beware AdMob, there is a new kid in town — Mojiva. Mojiva — a recent startup is making a very agressive entrance to mobile advertising market. They claim to have reached 1 billion served ads in just eight month which is unprecedented industry milestone. This achievement establishes Mojiva as one of the fastest growing mobile advertising platforms in industry history, and shows that advertisers prefer Mojiva’s simple three-step approach to creating, controlling, and tracking mobile advertising campaigns, complete with custom landing pages for products and services. It also illustrates Mojiva’s appeal to publishers, who are using the platform to rapidly monetize mobile content, tapping a mobile advertising market estimated at $2.7 billion in 2008

Mojiva follows closely AdMob’s path by catching the long tail of smaller advertisers and publishers which proved to be very successful. Dave Gwozdz – one ot the founding members of the DoubliClick and currently Mojiva’s CEO - says “Mobile advertising is one of the bright spots in the ad business, even in this challenging economy”. Today there are nearly 3 billion mobile subscribers worldwide, with a billion more expected to be online by 2010 and the number of smartphones is growing every minute.

AdMob launches mobile version of the website

Max — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 05:08:10 +0000

We have already covered AdMob a few times and it seems they’ve been working hard to keep their users happy (both the advertisers and publishers). We have heard reports that lately the fill rate as well as cost per million (CPM) and cost per impression (CPC) were all up — providing more revenue for the publishers.

As well their exchange program (currently available only for iPhone) that was recently deployed will allow app owners to promote their application while displaying ads and decide on the balance. AdMob take on this service is probably twofold. First it probably wants to minimize unused inventory and I must admit they came up with pretty creative way of doing so. At the same time, they are providing more value to their current customers, thus enhancing the experience overall.

Just couple hours ago, they have launched the mobile version of their website, which includes the management panel among the rest of the things. So far from what I can tell it is pre

AdMarvel – ad networks aggregator and mediation server

Max — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 22:14:10 +0000

AdMarvel’s open advertising aggregation and mediation platform (read my post about advertising aggregation and mediation platforms here) allows mobile publishers and advertising platform sites to use a central place to reach each other. To publishers, it allows to integrate inventory from any participating ad network into their data services and track the overall performance through a dashboard interface. To advertising companies, it allows to reach all the participating publishers.

The company has recently made significant positive changes. It has boosted its ad-serving functionality to enable its customers to provision, manage and track the effectiveness of both sourced campaigns and internally developed house ads. It also now offers a variety of pricing models and targeting by device type, user profile and operator and frequency capping.

New analytics tools allow the users to track technical and revenue performance information across a publisher’s network and deliver detailed reports on ad requests, fill rates, click-through rates, ECMP, users, devices and geographic distribution.

Many iPhone and Android developers who are trying to monetize their application through AdMob advertising network, are starting to look into using AdMarvel to fill the unused repository. Low fill rates have been plagueing AdMob for quite some time now and many publishers although being concerned could not do a lot about it. Using Ad network aggregators like AdMarvel, can help publishers use the unused repository through independt advertisers or other advertisers through AdMarvel aggregation service.

Hopefully the copetition will boost revenue the publishers are receiving from AdMob and lower the pricing for advertisers. It seems that soon AdMob will have to compromise for lower margins or loose a lot of business. It looks that the general path AdMob is choosing is the sane one — compromise for lower margins since it has been lowering prices for advertisiers and significantly improving fill rates for the publishers.

AdMob lowering the minimum bid for many ad targeting options

Max — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 02:55:45 +0000

Admob, a mobile advertising company that we have continuously reported about since it is the only mobile advertising company right now that supports Android publishers is reporting to lower the minimum bids for its advertisers for many platforms. We could not get the information about how it will affect the Android publishers, but from our own experience the revenue was plunging almost constantly, with lately going up, probably due to the start of new month and having advertising companies renew their monthly campaigns.

We assume, this is a wise step on AdMob side in those hard economical clmate. It does not risk anything really since the company is saving for itself a predefined cut of the revenue and giving the rest to the publishers, so this should not really influence the economics of AdMov. The publishers on the other hand will suffer. But untill AdMob has a serious competition from someone else, they can basically do whatever they want and have enough publishers stick with the company to deliver the ads.

We can only hope that the general climate will improve soon and that AdMob will be treating their publishers in a fair manner although they currently pretty much control all the small publishers in mobile space.

Paid application to become available on Android mid next week

Max — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 18:24:46 +0000

Developers from US and UK can go to the publisher website at http://market.android.com/publish to upload their application(s) along with end user pricing for the apps. The, priced applications will be available to end users in the US starting mid next week.

From Android market blog:

“We will also enable developers in Germany, Austria, Netherlands, France, and Spain to offer priced applications later this quarter. By the end of Q1 2009, we will announce support for developers in additional countries. Developers can find more information about priced applications in Android Market at http://market.android.com/support/

Google Checkout will serve as the payment and billing mechanism for Android Market. Developers who do not already have a Google Checkout merchant account can easily sign up for one via the publisher website.

Also, Android Market for free applications will become available to users in Australia starting February 15th Pacific Time and in Singapore in the coming weeks. Developers can now make their applications available in these countries via the publisher website at http://market.android.com/publish.”

Will we start to see much polished applications as a result? From the comments on the Android market for various application, users definitely hope so.

From the developers prospective, many would probably be concerned with the fact that the developers have to open a Google merchant account, since all the transactions are supposed to be handled through Google checkout.Consequently will they have even less than 70% of the sales due to fees associated with Google merchant account?

AdMob raises 12.5 Million in series C extension funding

Max — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:45:53 +0000

AdMob was the center point of the mobile news recently. We have recently mentioned that they just closed round B funding and today they announced to close additional 12.5 million round C funding lead by Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s (DFJ) Growth Fund and Northgate Capital. This bring the company funding to the total of $28.2 million. Being able to raise so much money in such a short period of time, especially in this economic downturn, says a lot about investors belief in the company.

While being profitable, the company lists the following reasons to recent funding series, mainly to allow future grown in this economic downturn, which hit especially hard the advertising businesses:

“We believe that now is a critical moment for us to cement our leadership position by making the investments that will help us to come out of this challenging economic environment even stronger than when we went in. As mobile Web and application usage continues to grow rapidly worldwide, and smart phones – from the iPhone to the G1 – gain in market share, we see a real opportunity to expand the mobile advertising market.”

AdMob Android SDK LunarLander example download

Max — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 15:29:07 +0000

As I have recently mentioned, AdMob released Android SDK to support ads for Android devices. I downloaded the SDK, it was however a pain in the a** to find it (AdMob, please make it easier = more obvious to find the SDK, please).

In general you have to open an account with AdMob, which I did that a long time ago since I was betting that they would be the first ones to make the move to the Android. Then you add a mobile site and while you do that, you have 3 options, iPhone, mobile site and Android. Then you fill out the “add new mobile website” form and get redirected to the code section. The last tab there is Android – hoorah!

The example of the LunarLander which shows ads when the game ends or is paused is not Eclipse ready. I made the more “friendly” LunarLander with AdMob SDK example.

AdMob launches ad units for Android with its Android SDK

Max — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 14:26:29 +0000

AdMob – the San Mateo-based company currently which according to CNET works with over 6, 000 mobile sites and 450 iPhone applications has announced today the release of Android advertising SDK as well. It is reported that the first test applications to utilize the ad units are AccuWeather (a weather application), TapJoy(has 2 gaming applications on the market), and Jirbo (major gaming developer in the iPhone market)

AdMob has already reported servermore than 27 million ads on mobile websites with requests coming from the Android platform in December 2008. The long awaited solution has arrived. Even though Android Market will soon have option for paid applications, AdMob is not discouraged:

“At some point in the next few quarters, Google will enable payment services for Android, but for now, app developers have no way to profit from building Android applications. Even once paid apps are available, we believe many free apps will still choose to monetize with ads – just like we’ve seen with iPhone apps.”

AdMob, incorporated in April 2006, has already established itself as the leading advertising platform in mobile space and has recently closed a series B funding round with $15.7M, lead by sequoia capital. Doing so, in this economical downtime, means a lot in terms of belief in the future potential.