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Google to Acquire AdMob for $750 Million
- dwynings 17y agohttp://www.google.com/press/admob/index.html http://www.google.com/press/admob/index.html
- jsm386 17y agoMakes perfect sense. A year and a half ago Eric Schmidt said this: Schmidt cited the iPhone as the first mobile device with a good web browser and that more devices will come to market, enabling advertising to become personal, during an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The CEO predicted that within a few years, mobile advertising would generate more revenue than advertising on today’s web. P.S. I wrote about this last week, speculating that the Android platform is really about expanding the mobile search ad inventory. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=922429 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=922429
- pbhjpbhj 17y agoI'd say any device running Opera was "the first mobile device with a good web browser".
- bham 17y agoI wonder what this means for us Adwhirl users.
- FreeRadical 17y agoI thought Adwhirl was acquired by AdMob...do you mean if there is a potential divestment of Adwhirl?
- z8000 17y ago> we will be releasing AdWhirl as an open source mediation solution From a newsletter I received this morning.
- acgourley 17y agoSo obviously I don't understand this market at all, can someone explain to me why google couldn't just copy ad-mob's business practices and features?
- gustaf 17y agoAdmob has a lock-in on the iPhone ecosystem that's hard to break.
- xsmasher 17y agoBingo. In order to beat admob you have to move their advertisers to your system (may be easy) and try to get app developers to run your ads instead of Admob's ads (hard). It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario (devs will not move until the advertisers are there, etc.) and much easier to just buy them outright.
- eli 17y agoThey did. Google's been running mobile ads (first in Japan, then worldwide) since 2006. But AdMob just plain does it better -- nicer interface and significantly higher CPMs for publishers. I'm sure they also wanted the talent. I've met one or two of the AdMob guys and they seem pretty sharp.
- acgourley 17y agoSeems like google could have used some of that 750M to operate at a loss, pay out higher CPMs and attract publishers. It also seems like google could have, in theory, copied their interface or even improved on it. Could it be that google's now too big to make those kind of adjustments once it builds the momentum? The talent angle of course makes sense, they are both pulling in top tier employees and removing top tier competition.
- litewulf 17y agoIts possible that operating at a loss would attract ire (because it really would be like the behavior Microsoft is/was so criticized for).
- tocomment 17y agoThe price seems kind of steep for something that puts ads in iPhone apps. Isn't the whole iPhone app marketplace worth a lot less than 750 million?
- alex_c 17y agoThe whole mobile advertising market is probably not much bigger than this, but it's growing, and AdMob is the clear leader. I suspect AdMob would be worth a lot more than this in a couple of years if left to its own devices, which is the bet Google is making.
- jfarmer 17y agoEric Schmidt said at one point he thinks mobile advertising will be bigger than web advertising.
- robk 17y agoNice exit. They had raised $47.2 million in prior rounds, so the multiples were still very healthy even on the last money in from DFJ.
- unohoo 17y agoTaking into account the admob and gizmo acquisitions, I cant help but admire google's acquisition strategy. Yes, they have made several acquisitions (dodgeball,jaiku etc.) only to shelve them later, but a lot of their acquisitions (doubleclick, analytics, admob) etc. are super strategic moves - compare this to yahoo's approach over the last few years, which acquired so many startups only to deadpool or offload majority of them.
- zaidf 17y agoCompletely agree. Dodgeball/Jaiku and the likes are sooooper tiny compared to the ones that google has gotten right(YouTube/Urchin/doubleclick). Yahoo can learn leaps from them. I don't think enough can be said about how good Google's acquisition strategy is.
- rokhayakebe 17y agoIMHO what they bought is not the technology or the team. It's the title "Leader in mobile advertising". You can't have that when you are Google.
- prbuckley 17y agoThis is a pretty impressive exit! I hope this is a sign of more liquidity in startup land.
- fcu_1 17y agoI predict for AdMob's eCPMs for November to drop sharply against their numbers for October based solely on their yanking of the IQ quiz SMS subscription offers (although they do still run some SMS-billing ringtone offers, so their numbers might not fall too fast). Those types of offers, while perhaps morally challenged, subsidize a tremendous amount of free content and services for the rest of us that have enough common sense not to click on them.
- FreeRadical 17y agoDoes admob have any significant competitors?