AdSense for Mobile
Posted on January 16th, 2010 by Jon
Yes, this isn’t a totally new concept, and yes, I just summarized some stuff I’ve read about on the internet. I think it is great that Google is still on their conquest to conquer my toaster though.
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For a few years, Google has offered the selling and purchasing of ad space via their Adsense program. The way it works is a vendor or company purchases ad space from Google, and Google offers to anyone the ability to put an ad on their webpage. The ad is automatically generated by text located on the webpage that best relates to an ad that Google has been charged to sell. Up until just a couple of months ago, ads were designed to be seen on PC’s and were not optimized for mobile browsers, such as those on telephones.
Google’s plan is to push more business and ads out through smartphones such as Apples iPhone, Google’s own Android, and even the Palm Pre. Prior to the optimization of the ads that Google is attempting to do, ads would load the same as if they were going to be viewed on a PC. The issue is that PC’s have much larger screens and normally much better bandwidth than their mobile counterpart. This gives PC users the edge on viewing content as compared to mobile users. In an attempt to sell more ads and leverage a more or less untouched market, Google will optimize the ads by utilize more text which will improve visibility as well as load times. The end goal is to help publishers by pushing more content to practically anyone that uses the internet.
The way that Google will leverage this service is via a new piece of code. The JavaScript will somehow reduce the latency on the mobile phone, or the time taken for information to traverse from the phone to the server where the information is stored. Even more formats and sizes will be available to publishers in order for them to take advantage of this new program. After all, the publisher as well as the company in the ad (as well as Google) stands to make money by having more ad space.
The best part about Google’s new ad system is that publishers will not be required to do anything to take advantage of these new ad spaces. The aforementioned JavaScript does all of the work for the browser. It knows whether a “full” PC browser is being used, or if the user is visiting a site from a handheld device and utilizing a “mobile” browser.
Gartner, a leading market tester, believes that smartphones will make up as much as 27% of the entire market of cellular devices very soon. This presents a huge opportunity for advertising. Also, this presents the opportunity for smartphone manufacturers to take advantage of the folks that will be using the new mobile ad space market.
There are some financial analysts that are predicting that the mobile ad market will not have as large of an effect as some might hope that it will. Bernstein Research’s Jeffrey Lindsay predicts that the mobile market just is not there yet, and will not be in the foreseeable future. What this means is that Google’s attempt to corner even more of the ad market may be for nothing. As stated before, the largest limitation to the mobile market is the still somewhat slow network speed and the forever limited viewing space. People do use their mobile phones for browsing the internet, but the mobile phone has yet to replace the experience that can be had by viewing the same content from a PC.
Lindsay did go on to say that by 2013, the mobile ad market could start to emerge. Although this may not be as quick as some think it will impact, it is likely that Google has long term goals for the technology, and simply putting the idea into the market is the best place to start. Lindsay believes that when the technology does start to catch on, that it could represent as much as $2.2 billion in business for ad revenue, just in searches and displaying of ads alone (Google pays per impression for ad placement). He also believes that Yahoo! may have some room to maneuver their way into the mobile ad market as well.
All of Google’s ideas concerning the mobile ad market look great on paper, but their own people are having some issues with it. It was supposed to launch in August, but that time came and went. There has been some struggle in adapting the current ad program to fit on the many different, and diverse, set of emerging smartphones that are currently available in the market. When the idea does finally catch on though, the revenue created by it could represent a sizable and not to go unnoticed portion of the ad market.
Boulton, C. (2009, October 5). Google Boosts AdSense for Mobile for iPhone,
Android, Palm Pre. Retrieved January 16, 2010, from :
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Mobile-and-Wireless/Google-Boosts-AdSense-for-Mobile-For-IPhone-Android-Palm-Pre-415315/
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