I’m happy to announce that we’ve secured an additional $12.5 million in a Series C extension round of funding from Draper Fisher Jurvetson’s (DFJ) Growth Fund and Northgate Capital. This gives us a combined $28.2 million in Series C funding that we are using to help grow our lead in mobile advertising.

We’ve already begun to make the investments we outlined when we announced our initial Series C funding in October 2008, they include:

• Accelerating the growth of worldwide operations by hiring local staff in key markets and adding new language interfaces, with an emphasis in Western Europe, India, South Africa, and Japan
• Deepening the investment in the company’s mobile technology platform, including its targeting, optimization, and ad serving algorithm
• Expanding the breadth of offerings for both publishers and advertisers
• Increasing the leadership position in the U.S. by growing AdMob’s sales and business development teams

We believe that now is a critical moment for us to cement our leadership position by making the investments that will help us to come out of this challenging economic environment even stronger than when we went in. As mobile Web and application usage continues to grow rapidly worldwide, and smart phones – from the iPhone to the G1 – gain in market share, we see a real opportunity to expand the mobile advertising market.

Omar

It has been a wild year for AdMob, as I’m sure it has been for many companies. Everyone is rightfully concerned about the global economy.  We are too. But at the same time we are optimistic about the growth of the mobile media industry in 2009 across the world. I want to share some details on AdMob’s business and direction.

We expect that history will repeat itself and that advertisers will choose media options that offer reach, quality and profitable return on investment. We launched AdMob Mobile Analytics in July so that the entire mobile internet ecosystem could benefit from data-driven insights. We’re thrilled that we’re seeing advertisers from every segment use these tools to measure the return on their advertising investments. The exciting effect of this is that the tool is removing uncertainty, and enabling our customers to justify larger mobile ad budgets. Almost all of them have confirmed that mobile will be an even bigger part of their marketing mix in 2009.

As I’ve said before, we are using our new Series C funding in three ways:
1) Invest in technology that further improves ROI for all of advertisers including campaign targeting (day parting and handset targeting are coming soon), optimization technology, and robust campaign measurement technologies.
2) Hire more sales personnel across the US, EMEA, Asia, and the Spanish speaking markets to bring new advertisers into our marketplace.
3) Developing new advertising units for the fast-growth next generation devices , like we have with the iPhone.

Keeping an advertising network perfectly balanced is always challenging. The macro factors of better phones, faster networks, and more affordable data packages, plus the addition of many more new publishing partners to our network in the last 3 months, has caused the advertising dollars in our marketplace to be spread more broadly. At the same time, our advertising deal flow continues to grow and we expect it will catch up with available inventory shortly.

But short term imbalances aside, fundamentally, the largest dollars will always flow to media options that have reach, that work, and deliver the best value. Our technology combined with high quality mobile media offerings from our publisher partners is what delivers the best value, and that’s why we remain optimistic and enthusiastic about our growth.

Thanks.
Omar

AdMob has always focused on delivering the best possible results for both our publisher partners and advertisers – and with our new Series C round of funding we are going to be able to continue to invest in the technology, operations and team that have set the bar for the mobile industry.

We are going to use this new funding to expand the breadth of services for publishers and advertisers. This includes deepening the investment in our mobile technology platform, accelerating the growth of our worldwide operations by hiring local staff in key markets and adding new language interfaces, and increasing leadership position in the U.S. by growing our sales and business development teams.

In the past twelve months we’ve more than tripled the number of ads we serve on a monthly basis to 4.6 billion in September 2008. We’ve added publisher partners including MySpace, EA Mobile and CNET to our network of more than 6,000 publishers worldwide and developed a healthy balance of brand and performance advertisers.

While we recognize the current economic conditions are challenging, we expect mobile advertising – and AdMob’s leadership role in it – to continue to grow, albeit at a potentially slower rate. In challenging economic times advertisers shift budget to media that is measurable and since mobile is one of the most measurable forms of media today I believe AdMob can benefit from this shift. Mobile advertising is performing well and delivering measurable results for both performance and brand advertisers on our network.

We look forward to continuing to work with our publisher partners and advertisers over the next year to continue to capitalize on the mobile opportunity.

Omar