Mobile Advertising: iAd versus AdMob

Posted by Bart on November 23, 2010

What is iAd?

iAd is a mobile advertising platform developed by Apple Inc. for its iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad line of mobile devices allowing third-party developers to directly embed advertisements into their applications. Announced on April 8, 2010, iAd is part of Apple’s iOS 4, originally slated for release on June 21, 2010, the actual date change to July 1, 2010 was announced at Apple’s June 7, 2010 keynote, with an iPad version appearing in the fall. Hosted and sold by Apple, the iAd platform is expected to compete with Google’s AdMob mobile advertising service.

Similar to AdMob, iAd will facilitate integrating advertisements into applications sold on the iOS App Store. If the user taps on an iAd banner, a full-screen advertisement will appear within the application, unlike other ads that send the user into the Safari web browser. Ads are promised to be more interactive than on other advertising services, and users will able to close them at any time, returning to where they left their app. Apple CEO Steve Jobs has indicated that Apple will retain 40% of the ad revenue, in line with what he called “industry standard”, with the other 60% going to the developers. iAd is expected to benefit free applications as well.

And what is AdMob?

AdMob is a mobile advertising company founded by Omar Hamoui. It was incorporated in 2006 and is based in San Mateo, California. In November 2009 it was acquired by Google for $750 million. The acquisition was completed on May 27, 2010. Apple Inc. had also expressed interest in purchasing the company the very same year, but they were out-bid by Google, and have since introduced their own iAd advertising platform. Prior to being acquired by Google, AdMob acquired the company AdWhirl, formerly Adrollo, which is a platform for developing advertisements in iPhone applications. AdMob offers advertising solutions for many mobile platforms, including Android, iOS, webOS, Flash Lite, and all standard mobile web browsers.

AdMob is one of the world’s largest mobile advertising platforms and claims to serve more than 7.1 billion mobile banner and text ads per month across mobile Web sites and handset applications.

The Mobile Advertising business will be a big fight: iAd versus AdMob, iOS versus Android, Apple versus Google.

I bet on Google to win the Advertising battle, but let’s wait and see.

More about Apple iAd here. More about Google AdMob here.

Google’s Android catches Apple’s iOS For Mobile Ad Impressions

Posted by Bart on November 21, 2010

(Source: TalkAndroid.com)

Apple may be a little worried by this latest report which shows that Google’s Android has actually caught up to Apple’s iOS in ad network impressions on Millennial Media, the largest US smartphone ad platform. This is an attractive mark for developers who are looking to put apps out on different platforms, as we know developers have less wait for approval on the Android Market for their apps, which turns into faster financial gains. This report shows that Android now has as many ad impressions on mobile devices now, which is another bonus for more developers moving to Android development as a priority rather than iOS app store.

The total requests (the number of times a mobile ad is clicked on) for Android increased by 65% over the month of November compared to iOS 12% growth, also, Android has risen by 2182% since the beginning of this year, compared to iOS 32% in the same time frame. millennial Media covers 80% of the total mobile internet.

Very impressive growth for Android, and it’s only going to get bigger!