go-Digital Blog on Digital Marketing

Google Just Created A Gigantic New Mobile Ad Marketplace (GOOG)

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/massive-google-just-created-a-gigantic-new-mobile-ad-marketplace-2012-6

Google has integrated AdMob, its mobile advertising service, into AdWords so that anyone buying web ads through AdWords can now also buy them on mobile devices served by AdMob, according to Jonathan Alferness, Google’s director of product management/mobile ads.

The move essentially turns the web and mobile ad markets into the same, massive market. It adds 350 million mobile devices and 300,000 mobile apps to the AdWords universe, on all types of devices. Previously, AdWords reached 2 million web sites accessible by computers.

• See Google’s new step-by-step instructions for buying mobile campaigns on AdMob here.

The move comes hours after Facebook did something similar—providing turnkey access to mobile and desktop, display and news feeds ads through its ads API. Taken together, it appears that Google and Facebook envision the web and mobile ad marketplaces eventually fusing into a relatively seamless whole.

Jason Spero, head of global mobile sales and strategy at Google, told Ad Age he believes that the AdWords/AdMob conjunction will scale up the mobile market dramatically by applying Google’s main ad revenue engine to handheld device platforms.

On mobile, available inventory has thus far outmatched the demand for ads against it, depressing prices dramatically (especially at Google). A new influx of mobile advertisers from AdMob might raise mobile prices, but by directly pitting web ad inventory against mobile inventory it could also lead to lower average prices across the board.

Please follow Advertising on Twitter and Facebook.

Join the conversation about this story »

Tags: AdMob, advertising, Adwords, API, depressing prices, desktop, device platforms, Goog, google, massive market, Mobile, mobile ads, mobile advertising, mobile apps, mobile inventory, mobile sales, move, something, turnkey, twitter