Has mobile advertising grown up?
Admob on iPhone
Lot’s of people can complain about the annoyances of ads on the computer but what happens when it starts getting on your mobile phone? Ever since Apple introduced the ever popular iPhone into the market, many developers have been looking for ways to monetize their work in other ways unlike traditional revenue sources. While many companies entered this space, one company grew apart from the rest and experienced double digit growth year after year. AdMob, one of the largest advertising marketplaces which signs up advertisers and publishers, said it had seen 6.8 billion network requests in January alone, driven by publishers who want to make money while giving away their content for nothing. But some critics disagree with mobile advertising as a successful marketing tool to reach consumers,”While we all believe in mobile advertising, we have to recognize that it hasn’t taken off as quickly as expected,” said Vodafone’s Vittorio Colao.
The problem with current mobile advertising techniques is that its not specifically targeted to a demographic (broadly). Google’s success in the desktop advertising space came about because it captured the users attention while they were searching for answers. Providing relevant key ads and integrating a rich framework of user data to target specific demographics really made google shine and perfect for advertisers to reach a higher ROI. I doubt AdMob can bring this level of scrutinty to its ad results but let’s just hope this market thrives since Google is well on its way to enter in this space with it’s roadmap of using Android as another platform for collecting user activity metrics and “COUGH* Android Desktop OS.