Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Google sharpens aim on mobile marketing with AdMob

Four years ago, Omar Hamoui was just another businessman trying to inefficient Spruce his CV to graduate school.

Now he is in the new weapon to Google Inc., the company intends to extend its dominance of online advertising from computers to mobile devices.

Google is Hamoui acquisition of skills for the acquisition of 750 million AdMob, a network for the ads on iPhones and similar devices. He started the company, while fighting for his wife and children to support as a student at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School.

Hamoui, 32, has his life by changing to a system for advertising on mobile devices. Although this seems simple, it was a breakthrough because the network Hamoui the stifling controls that mobile operators had imposed on the contents of their customers see on their mobile phones bypassed. AdMob, the gap opened in walled gardens of the carriers' It is easier for independent programmers applications planted on mobile phones to receive.

His "It has great courage, because they (carriers) have been the guardians of the industry," said Rich Wong, an AdMob investor and board member who is from Accel Partners. "At the time, it was like when you say no to the Godfather. Bad things can happen."

More than a year after Hamoui lit the fuse, Apple Inc. blew the status quo in the June 2007 launch of the iPhone - that has created a platform for applications selected by the users.

That was the birth of more than 100,000 mobile "applications" for everything from bird watching to cook poultry. The revenue from the advertising network AdMob is one of the developers of the application of the main reasons to offer programs or immediately load a little money.

"Omar was absolutely at the forefront of this revolution in mobile media," said Jason Spero, AdMob's CEO in North America.

If the proposed acquisition by Google from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission is authorized Hamoui believes AdMob and 150 employees are in an even better position to be turning cell phones into the lucrative magnet.

Google put on him.

Based on more than 20 billion U.S. dollars revenue from ads on the Internet, Google has invested heavily in mobile technology. The leading Internet search is a free software system, Android, mobile devices and experimenting with its own phone, called Nexus One, which could be sold directly to consumers, runs developed.

Google believes that justify the explosive growth of mobile advertising their spending. For now, the market is still relatively small, with mobile advertising revenues in the United States should reach 416 million U.S. dollars this year, according to research firm eMarketer Inc.

AdMob has delivered nearly 140 billion ads on mobile websites and applications since its inception. This has contributed to AdMob double turnover this year, after it tripled in the last year. Hamoui is no longer accurate estimate, according to analysts that the revenue AdMob less this year from 45 million to 60 million.

It is generating less revenue that Google in a day. However, the leadership was involved in the early mobile advertising AdMob hardly Antitrust Authority already has the growing power of Google. The Federal Trade Commission requested more information on the agreement - a sign that the regulators will look more closely at how they affect competition in the mobile advertising market, which affects expected to quadruple in size over the next four years.

Only two of the acquisitions of Google have been greater than the proposed transaction, AdMob. The regulators quickly to purchase $ 1.76 billion Google-Video channel on the Internet, YouTube, in 2006, but took a year before signing off for the purchase of 3.2 billion U.S. dollars from another Internet Service ads, DoubleClick Inc., in 2008. (Incidentally, AdMob seat opposite the place where YouTube started in San Mateo, California, USA)

Google maintains its takeover AdMob will not hurt competition. Among other things, Google points to other networks of mobile advertising by its competitors as Jumptap, Mojiva and AOL, and argues that mobile ads yet to win generate spending enough to serve as a distinct market.

Hamoui started AdMob in frustration a few months later, he enrolled in the graduate school. He was the construction of a telephone help-friendly web site, for people to share pictures with family and friends, but he could not attract much traffic.

To spread the word, Hamoui bought some ads that appear alongside search results on Google, Yahoo and other engines. This eventually cost him about $ 30 per transfer, could not afford it. Hamoui decided that advertising works on its website other mobile sites that are specifically to be used with small screens and support technology of mobile phones to try.

Hamoui was ready a mobile site, run their ad for much less money and eventually pay only 10 cents per transfer. The experience echoes Hamoui studies on the efficiency of markets, and inspired him to a network that would build a better advertising on mobile devices.

If nothing else, he thought he could leave in a position to advertising network in a project that he, to a classical education would have to turn during his summer break in 2006. In this case, AdMob created enough buzz that Hamoui left Wharton in the spring.

A central element of his system is that it allows programmers to specify when and where your ads can appear if their applications run on a phone. The advertisers and others from the mass merchants makers can use its variable message have several goals - for example, everyone with an iPhone. And ads can be targeted at a specific demographic. An advertisement for the movie "Fast and Furious" may appear on a mobile game as "Tap Tap Revenge", which is popular with young men. Targeting often hits the mark: users tend to click on ads, moved five to eight times as common as on the PC ads, "said Hamoui.

Jim Goetz, which joined the Supervisory Board after AdMob firm Sequoia Capital, the first $ 4 million from 47 million U.S. dollars Venture Capital, AdMob, Hamoui share increased in comparison to some other successful entrepreneurs that has helped Sequoia. This group includes Apple's Steve Jobs, co-founder of Yahoo Jerry Yang and David Filo, and Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.

"Omar is a bit like them," said Goetz. "He has ambition, intelligence and spark to something special."

By selling his startup to a big company, not have something Hamoui the other contractors. His investors say, he did so not because of money - AdMob much stayed on the bench, and by striking Hamoui does not seem to be causing them rich. He still running a lime-green Toyota Camry, the irony in a good mood around the offices AdMob raises. When he sports, he does so sparingly. AdMob, the Christmas party will take place next month, when prices are cheaper.

"I have thought we were capable of things we want much faster and much better with the resources we are at Google," said Hamoui. "We have already achieved much of what we wanted to do - allow advertising goes mobile, and the people, a mobile telephone company, without an agreement to begin with a first carrier."

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