ReadWriteWeb

Mobile advertising is exploding. The opportunities for developers and publishers to make money through mobile advertising has grown exponentially in the last couple of years. There are a lot of options to market and monetize apps, but when it comes to advertising, there is still just one company that dominates the ecosystem: Google.

We write a lot about mobile advertising companies. Nexage, Tapjoy and JumpTap have all made significant news recently. Yet, as Nexage president and CEO Ernie Cormier told us once, "it is a Google Market." Yet, there has been confusion between what developers and publishers are supposed to use, AdMob or AdSense? Google clarified what each service is for last week.

When setting up Google AdWords campaigns, it can pretty difficult to guess which ad copy is going to perform the best. Sometimes even the tiniest, most unexpected changes can have a dramatic impact on ad performance. But how do you know what will be most effective?

A new Y Combinator-backed startup called MixRank wants to help take some of the guesswork out the process. The self-described "spy tool for contextual and display ads" offers businesses a glimpse at AdSense campaigns being run by other companies and shows which ones had the best performance.

Yesterday Google launched AdWords API v201101. The new addresses requests for faster reports, adds the ability to run experimental ad campaigns and expands support for geo-targeted ad campaigns.

Google will deprecate old versions of the API August 2011.

Google's AdSense for Feeds, the RSS publishing service formerly known as FeedBurner, got a long-overdue refresh today and now displays subscriber and reader interaction stats in real time. When will Google Analytics get real-time stats? That's the question many people are asking - but it's not entirely clear how useful that would be.

Feed subscriber numbers are generally good to know, and revenues from feeds are better than a poke in the eye. But ultimately pageviews are what matter most to publishers. People say that Feedburner has declined in importance because of the rise of Twitter, but no publishing middleware is as important as readers landing on your page itself. There is potential for these kinds of real-time analytics to be leveraged for automated optimization of editorial decision making, but that's a relatively nascent field.

Google finally revealed this morning just how much it takes as its share when advertisers buy ads on content and search inside AdSense. According to a release this morning on the AdSense blog, all publishers pocket 68% revenue for content ads and 51% for search ads, except for high profile publishers which negotiate their own shares. Google says they are revealing these numbers "in the spirit of greater transparency," but what is the real motivation behind their decision?

It seems like in the past few months Google has relentlessly released new applications, some of which perhaps could have used some more baking in the oven before they were unleashed on the general public. To some it's becoming a tiresome exercise simply to try to keep up with everything that Google is doing week in and week out. But there is a method to the madness, and it has a lot more to do with Google's bottom line than you may think.

We all know that the way the search engine giant makes money is through advertising - over $23 billion in 2009 - but what may surprise you is that its advertising-based revenue comes almost exclusively from sites that are owned by Google.

It's called a spoiler tactic. You take your competitor's biggest cash cow and offer a free alternative. Everybody from Linux to Google has used the tactic against Microsoft. So who can fault Microsoft when it uses it against Google's advertising cash cow? The guys who benefit from this tactic today are the good folks at OpenX, the open-source alternative to ad servers from Google such as DoubleClick (for big publishers) and AdManager (for small publishers). (Disclosure: ReadWriteWeb uses OpenX to host our advertising inventory.)

Of course, ad-serving itself is not really the cash cow, but it is a key part of it. The real prize is a viable alternative to AdSense. This is the background of today's news about OpenX and Microsoft announcing an advertising technology partnership.

YouTube's Promoted Videos - the video ads that often appear to the right of the currently playing video in YouTube and next to search results - are now coming to regular websites as well. Starting today, Promoted Videos will appear in AdSense units through the Google Content Network and will compete with text and image ads in AdSense's ad auctions. Interestingly, AdSense already offers video ads, though it classifies them as 'image ads.' These two video ad units will now run side by side.

A few years ago, we spoke of the "AdSense Economy." It was so simple. Create a website, slap on an AdSense widget, and voila: "Insta-biz." Wow! Who knew business could be so simple? AdSense was proof of Google's genius, having grown into a multi-billion dollar business in only a few years after its launch in 2003. Google's search business continues to grow in dominance, and the company's apps business is putting a serious dent in Microsoft's franchise.

But cracks are appearing in AdSense. AdSense is 30% of Google's revenue, so this matters. Any weakness in AdSense is important for Google's investors as well as advertisers, publishers, users, and entrepreneurs.

RSS and podcast publishing service FeedBurner has been a great friend to bloggers over the years but this morning announced that it will shut down its own blog Burning Questions. Readers will now be referred to a new blog, AdSense for Feeds. FeedBurner is so useful for so many things beyond serving up ads in feeds that there's something sad about the symbolism here.

As a part of the announcement FeedBurner offers information for publishers about how to migrate from FeedBurner to a new Google account, as in the future all feed related services will require a Google account. It's the end of an era, really.