It’s against this context that ecosystem experts invariably raise their eyebrows when they read that AdMob serves over 300 million ads per month to Indian users on non-carrier mobile websites. The numbers are significant because they suggest that India’s off-deck mobile web activity, along with the market for mobile advertising, have already hit a crescendo.

As in South Africa, many of the sites Indian users are visiting today are internationally-based, and that very well may be because local content simply isn’t available: of India’s top 10 internet sites (according to current Alexa rankings), only Rediff, Cricinfo, and MoneyControl have deployed full-fledged mobile versions (the latter two are AdMob publishers). The opportunity presented to media owners and entrepreneurs, then, is clear: invest in creating a strong mobile web presence today and you’ll have the opportunity to build a technology, traffic, and monetization advantage now and into the future.

If you’d like to work with us in India as a publisher or advertiser/agency, drop us a line: india@admob.com.

-Zubair Jandali
Mumbai, India

A couple of months back we held our 1st Annual AdMob Engineering Chili Cookoff. We all love good food at AdMob. We’re especially serious about all things spicy. A cookoff seemed like a good way for us to hang out in the park for an afternoon and give one team of engineers and/or product managers bragging rights over the superiority of their culinary creation.

We had a ton of fun, and in the voting following the event, we had a clear winner. The winning team had a well-crafted strategy. They knew that a sizable fraction of AdMob engineering was vegetarian, so they avoided meat in their recipe. They also appreciated that even though almost everyone in engineering claimed to like spicy food, that everyone’s spiciness threshold was different. Accordingly, they made two batches of their chili and provided a variety of sauces and fresh chilies so that folks could tune spiciness precisely to their taste. The winning team also used great ingredients, sought advice on their recipe from experienced veggie chili makers, and did a good job of managing the logistics of chili construction by careful division of labor and time management.

Not to destroy that which is uniquely artistic about cooking good food for friends, but a lot of what led to the winning team’s success was good product design and engineering. They designed their product to appeal to the widest possible audience. They consulted their peers for best practices. They didn’t skimp on the quality of their components. And they shipped their complicated product on time by planning ahead, splitting the work up into semi-independent chunks, and carefully coordinating the integration of their individual work early and often.

Now here’s the winning recipe as conceived of and prepared by Alvin, Anu, Josh, Prasana, and Sashi.

Ingredients:

• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 onion, chopped
• 2 carrots, peeled, thinly sliced
• 1 red bell pepper, seeded, chopped
• 3 large jalapeño chilies, seeded, minced (about 4 1/2 tablespoons)
• 3 habanero chilis (for the spicy version only)
• 3 Choyote squashes
• 1 28-ounce can crushed tomatoes with added puree
• 3 cups water
• 2 15-ounce cans black beans, rinsed, drained
• 2 15-ounce cans kidney beans, rinsed, drained
• 2 cans of garbanzo beans
• 2 cans of lima beans
• 2 tablespoons white wine vinegar
• 5 garlic cloves, minced
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cumin
• 1 1/2 teaspoons ground coriander
• 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnammon
• 1/2 to 1 bag of Morningstar Veggie Beef Crumbles

Preparation:

Heat 2 tablespoons olive oil in heavy large pot over medium-high heat. Add onion, carrots, red bell pepper, and jalapeños and sauté until onion and carrots are almost tender, about 8 minutes. Add tomatoes, 3 cups water, beans, veggie beef crumbles, white wine vinegar, garlic, and spices. Bring to boil. Reduce heat to medium-high and cook, uncovered, until mixture thickens, stirring often, about 20 minutes. Ladle chili into bowls and serve.

–Kevin Scott, VP of Engineering

We are often asked “how fast is the mobile web growing?”.  For our featured section this month, we estimated mobile web growth by tracking the growth of a fixed set of AdMob publishers to estimate their organic growth rate.  We believe this is a good proxy for the organic growth of the mobile web, as it controls for the addition of new publishers on the network.  We found that:

* Traffic from the 473 publishers grew 104% from July 2007 to June 2008.  This indicates that the mobile web more than doubled in 12 months ending in June 2008.
* The US and UK grew substantially faster than the worldwide rate.

Smartphone usage continued to increase across our network in June.  Impressions from the iPhone and iTouch increased 32% worldwide month over month – and that was prior to the v2 launch.  The Palm Centro and Nokia N95 continued their strong growth as well.

Download the free report at http://www.admob.com/s/solutions/metrics.  You can sign up to receive future reports by emailing metrics@admob.com.  As always, we welcome your feedback.
 
Jason Spero
VP Marketing

Our second post today discusses AdMob’s new ad creation user interface and describes some of the techniques that went into building it.  We also offer up a hint at the first of several upcoming contributions back to the open source community, an extension to the EXT JS AJAX library’s tree widget.

–Kevin Scott, VP Engineering

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/13/technology/13stream.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

It started with a venturebeat article with a hypothesis on how we are doing and how we will be doing soon. (that is not the part I wanted to comment on)

This led to a number of postings which more or less call out the iPhone as particularly dangerous to our business, and I’ve included links to a few just for reference:

http://yardley.ca/2008/07/07/there-is-no-mobile/

http://www.seriouslytech.com/2008/07/07/is-the-mobile-ad-market-poised-to-break-out-or-to-disappear/

The question around the iPhone is certainly not new to us… actually a search on our blog for iPhone turns up a number of interesting things:

Our thoughts on what the first iPhone meant for AdMob

Our discussion of our iPhone ad units

Some of the neat things we learned from the iPhone

A prediction that iPhone (and similar class) devices will have a dramatic impact on mobile browsing

As a last point, I figured I’d post a (really long) comment I just left on Silicon Alley Insider in response to this article.

See you next iPhone

Dan, very interesting post. You asked for some AdMob folks to chime in, so I figured I’d oblige you. We’ve been spending a great deal of time thinking about and working with the iPhone. We share your view that it is only a matter of time (and not a long matter of time) until the majority of mobile browsing is done on devices that have full featured browsers. To that end we have been working with iPhones since they launched and have been allowing advertisers to reach iPhone users for quite some time (you can see a few of our campaigns here - http://www.admob.com/s/solutions/iphone_ad). To put some numbers around this, we served 52 million impressions on the iPhone and iPod Touch in June up from 39m in May (32% month on month increase).

Although your analysis makes sense on the surface, I would take issue with a number of the underlying points you made. The first is that our sole differentiator is based on the installation and serving of advertising. Although it is a different process than online ad installation, the fact is that this does not differentiate us from any of our competitors in the mobile advertising space (Google, Yahoo!, AOL, etc…). All of them have similar installation procedures. Also, considering the fact that the install code is publicly available it would be very difficult to build a defensible business around installation. The reality is that our differentiator comes from scale of mobile specific advertisers and some fairly sophisticated engineering and optimization built around which ad to serve and when.

Now to another central contention you make: You essentially assume that simply because “regular” ads can be served, they will inherently be optimal. The reality is that the value of an ad is based on three parties: the publisher, the advertiser, and the user. In the case of the publisher, they would like to see advertising that is relevant, plays well with their content both visually and thematically, and obviously, maximizes monetization for them. In the case of the advertiser, they are interested in making sure they have reached the most interested audience they can, in the right place at the right time (and now on the right device), and that they are paying a fair rate. In the case of the user, if you can show them a relevant ad that is respectful of both their experience and privacy, you will have a win.

The reality is that in all three cases, ads designed for the web as viewed from a PC are not and will not be optimal. Let’s think about advertisers for a moment. Let’s say you run an ecommerce site and are willing to pay 50 cents a click to get someone to come to your site and buy a product. The fact is that they are much less likely to go through your shopping cart on a phone, regardless of the browser. The same holds true for a lead gen advertiser who is expecting users to fill out a long form. In these (and many other) cases, the advertiser will actually be upset if a publisher or ad network recklessly shows their ad regardless of device. If they bought assuming it would show on a PC, it’s simply not fair to show it on a phone. On the flip side, there are plenty of advertisers who would pay significantly more to show up in the context of a smart phone with all of its unique advantages (multimedia, phone calls, etc…), as long as they know that’s where the ad will appear. As a publisher, you will be getting much more relevant (and higher paying) ads if you work with someone to sell specifically for the device.

Although the idea of a unified web where everything is exactly the same (including advertising) is intriguing, the reality is that all the recent advancements in digital advertising (search, behavioral, demographic, and psychographic targeting, etc…) have been about differentiation of audiences rather than amalgamation. In the context of advertising, there is significant value locked up in even subtle differences and we know from experience that the device you are browsing on is no subtle difference.

In short, we are well aware of the impact that the iPhone and smartphones in general are going to have on mobile browsing. The capabilities they make available both in browser and in app will further accelerate mobile data usage, and mobile advertising along with it. We view these developments as the future of our company, rather than some impending doom, and if we could magically wish their adoption to happen faster, we would.

Since South Africa is an important market for us, we’re growing our presence in South Africa by putting a team on the ground to work with local advertisers and publishers.  Most of the traffic from South African users in our network is on mobile websites hosted in other countries.  We see the fact that users are mostly visiting international sites as a tremendous opportunity for local sites to create compelling content for the South African market.  As more South Africans start visiting local content-focused mobile websites, local advertisers will likewise adopt mobile advertising as a great way to engage their target audience.  If you’re as excited about opportunities to grow the mobile web in South Africa as we are, drop us a line: SouthAfrica@admob.com
- Clay
Director, Business Development

We’re really proud of these products and their user interfaces. However, we’re equally proud of all of the machinery that powers AdMob that isn’t always visible to our users. In order to share some of the details of this behind-the-scenes machinery, we’ve created a new AdMob Engineering Blog. In addition to simply sharing our engineer’s enthusiasm for things that we’re building, we also hope that this blog allows us to contribute back to the engineering community some useful best practices we’ve discovered as we’ve employed a mix of proprietary and open source technology to build a highly-available, 100M+ request per day Internet service.

The types of things that we hope to share with you over the coming weeks are how we’re using Hadoop to process large volumes of data, the tools and techniques that we use for reliable message delivery between our internal services, how we’re using a combination of third-party and custom AJAX component libraries to build rich, in-browser user interfaces, the tools and techniques we use for service monitoring, and how we’re managing application deployment across hundreds of machines and multiple data centers.

Posts on the AdMob Engineering Blog will be written by engineers and targeted at a technical audience. That said, we invite everyone who is interested to subscribe to the blog’s feed or to place this blog in your regular reading list.

We’re kicking off our engineering blog with a post about the mechanics of mobile ad serving. We’re often asked how mobile ad serving differs from traditional, online ad serving. This post provides part of the answer to this question.

–Kevin Scott

• Spain and Italy are leading broad and rapid traffic growth in the region on sites in our network.  Indexed traffic shows traffic doubled on average since we began tracking in September 2007. Spain showed the greatest percentage growth and Ireland the slowest over the last 8 months.
• The iPhone is grabbing market share in Europe.  Apple’s Smartphone is in the top 10 devices in France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain.  The iPhone is in the top 20 devices in every market where Apple has a formal Operator distribution partnership.  In markets where the iPhone is in the top 20 devices, the iTouch is also in the top 20 devices.
• Symbian dominates Europe.  Symbian’s share of Smartphone traffic in Western Europe is 79%.

 
Sample data from the report: 

Learn more and download the free report here: www.admob.com/metrics
You can signup to receive future reports by emailing metrics@admob.com
 
Jason Spero
VP Marketing

The MMA has many important functions, particularly in establishing guidelines for its members, protecting consumers and developing all-important measurement criteria for mobile marketing campaigns. All this work is well underway and ongoing, being slickly developed by a raft of volunteers, who are themselves key mobile industry executives in their day jobs. They are also well supported by the MMA’s excellent small team of full-time staff.

If there’s one area I’d like to focus the MMA’s attention on this year, it’s evangelising the new medium to marketing decision makers, especially those who have yet to grasp that the PC explosion was just the appetizer for digital media and that mobile will be the main course. Or to think of it another way, the mobile is about to do to the PC, what the PC did to the mainframe. While this might sound like unjustified hype, such luminaries as Morgan Stanley’s Mary Meeker and the legendary Churchill Club are starting to say the same thing - the mobile will become our most important digital device.

History has also taught that when a new medium emerges, marketing dollars rush in to fill the vacuum and mobile is no exception. As mobile proves itself to be an effective channel (and it’s proving this daily) more brands, as well as advertisers from within the mobile ecosystem, will be investing bigger budgets as they experience the benefits that mobile can bring.

Some brands and agencies are still skeptical today. But one sign that the industry is maturing is the amount of research that now supports the argument for running mobile campaigns. For instance, M:Metrics recently published data that shows that not only are people who use mobile media more receptive to advertising than the average consumer, but that word of mouth champions are more likely to be mobile users than consumers of the internet, magazines or TV. While this might naturally be expected to apply to mobile brands, it also includes such diverse products such as retail, TV/audio, food and financial service products.

This is a message that needs to be heard, understood and digested on a strategic level by brands and agencies. But they also need to understand that they can start today by running successful, sophisticated, measurable mobile marketing campaigns – and on a surprisingly large scale already. One thing we’ve proved at AdMob, where we serve 3 Billion mobile web ads every month, is that this is a mass market proposition and if we include mobile operator inventory, as well as other networks and publishers, we come up with a very large number of places where ads can be run now. This is no longer an industry in its infancy.

The MMA is going to play a key role in helping advertisers understand this exciting new market, both directly and in partnership with other trade and industry bodies. If you want to understand and benefit from this experience or help to evangelise and share your own learnings about mobile marketing, please consider joining the MMA and benefiting from, and building on, the excellent foundations we’ve laid so far. If this sounds like an interesting proposition, please click here for more information, or drop me an email Russell AT admob DOT com and I’ll put you in touch with the right people in your region.

In the meantime, watch out for a big year for mobile marketing and the MMA.

– Russell