"We suspect AdMob collected personal location information without consent or approval from the Korean Communication Commission," a South Korean police official said in the report. Google has issued a statement that it is fully cooperating with the investigation. South Korea is one of the most technology-forward countries in the world with one of the highest adoption rates of smartphones on the globe.

AdMob was acquired by Google in November, 2009 for $750 million. The acquisition was approved by the Federal Trade Commission in May, 2010. The potential of location data to mobile advertisers is important as advertising attempts to extend its reach to the most granular level possible to offer consumers deals and location-based services. In and of itself, tracking and storing data location to provide services is may not be a negative to the consumer but the misuse, abuse and security of the data could have significant consequences which has sparked the concerns of consumers, governments and law enforcement.

Not surprisingly, the company found that Android has seen rapid growth thanks to the launch of new devices, Apple is still the top manufacturer and iPads are having an impact on mobile Internet traffic worldwide.

Before delving into the numbers themselves, it's important to note how AdMob generates this data - it uses its own network of ad requests, a metric which provides a slice of smartphone pie, but not perhaps the best snapshot of the industry as a whole. Some contend that AdMob's data slights that of RIM (makers of Blackberry), but even if so, there's still relevance to be found within AdMob's numbers, given their wide sampling. Changes within its network can speak to wider industry trends, which is worth examining.

Another important item of note is that AdMob was acquired by Google, makers of the Android operating system. The acquisition was announced back in November of 2009, but it took until May for Google to close the deal, due to a pending FTC inquiry into anti-trust matters. The regulatory body unanimously approved the deal in late May, citing Apple's entry into the mobile ad market industry as evidence of competition.

AdMob notes that the majority of the data in the report pre-dates the Google acquisition.

Just the Highlights

Disclosure out of the way, here are the latest findings, highlights first:

• 92 countries generated more than 10 million request in May 2010, up from 27 countries in May 2008
• Nokia leads in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe
• Apple leads in North America, Oceania and Western Europe
• In May 2010, smartphones generated 46% of traffic in the AdMob network, up from 22% 2 years ago
• 24% of May's traffic was via Wi-Fi
• Mobile Internet Devices (including the iPad, PSP and iPod Touch) consistently have accounted for 10% of traffic over the past year
• 57% of Apple devices in AdMob's network are outside the U.S.
• Traffic from the Android platform has grown 29% month-over-month since May 2009
• iOS and Android users spend 79 minutes per day using apps
• iOS and Android users download about 9 apps per month

Android Gains Thanks to New Devices

The introduction of numerous Android-based phones has allowed the mobile OS's market share to increase dramatically over the past year, AdMob finds. But what's most interesting is seeing what those gains look like, graphed out.

In this chart, for example, you can see a sharp increase in Android's market share while Apple's iOS market share drops. In February, Apple appears to have a 50% share, but by May, it's down to 40% worldwide.

And as of May 2010, 7 of the top 10 smartphones run Android, notes the report. These include the Motorola Droid, HTC Magic, HTC Hero, HTC Dream, Motorola CLIQ, HTC Droid Eris and Samsung Moment. The top smartphone, however, is still Apple's iPhone. Nokia's N70 and 6300 have also remained in the list over the past two years.

The report also looks at how both Apple's iOS and Google's Android OS register higher mobile Web and mobile app usage, relevant to their actual market share.

While again, AdMob's numbers are not meant to be definitive, there is a notable trend here - Android is gaining, and gaining fast. Worldwide, however, Apple still dominates while Symbian dominates in particular regions...at least for now.

According to Apple, only "independent" ad providers will be allowed to gather data. This excludes ad networks affiliated with "a developer or distributor of mobile devices," like Google's AdMob, or with "development environments other than Apple," like Adobe, which recently teamed with Greystripe to bring Flash ads to the iPhone.

Hamoui says Apple's "artificial barriers to competition" will not only hurt developers and users, but will slow mobile ad innovation. It is true that competition has spurred innovation and produced better results for consumers in the past, and that certainly would lead one to conclude that Apple's moves are in direct contrast to that belief.

However, it seems Apple is taking an AppStore approach to iAd - making it a closed system with no competitors on the company's devices. Just as it restricts what apps can and cannot be in the AppStore, Apple wants to limit which ad networks can and cannot serve ads on their phone. While the AppStore restrictions are partially meant to provide stable apps in line with Apple's positive user experience desires, the iAd restrictions seem more focused on driving away competition than producing better Ads for users.

The company's U.S. team is currently compromised of roughly 80 people. InMobi targets brand advertisers and also offers a self-serve tools for smaller advertisers. The company offers services for advertising on feature phones and on modern smartphone platforms.

When we talked to Ann Frisbie, InMobi's , VP and managing director for North America last week, she argued that so far, most players in the U.S. market treated the mobile Web as just an extension of the desktop Web. The company hopes to be able to differentiate itself from other players in the U.S., as its international experience has already taught the company where mobile advertising is heading in the near future. Abroad, Friebie said, the mobile phone was always seen more as an entertainment device, while users in the U.S. are only now starting to regard their phones in the same way (in no small part thanks to the iPhone). We should note, however, that AdMob also has a major global presence, and that it will likely profit from Google's own international expertise as well.

InMobi also hopes to differentiate itself through its analytics tools and its adROIt product, which allows advertisers to track and optimize their buys in real time.

The iPad SDK was already available as a beta for the last few months, but now that Google has officially acquired AdMob, the competition between the two companies has brought AdMob - which is already the largest ad network on the iPhone - into the middle of this rivalry. With iAds, Apple is trying to enter the market for interactive in-app ads written in HTML5 (instead of Flash), but Google is obviously not going to just stand by and wait for Apple to corner this lucrative advertising market.

For now, AdMob is only showing a "sneak peek" of the "creative potential of iPad ads using HTML5," but we wouldn't be surprised if AdMob/Google unveiled a beta of this solution by the time the iPhone 4 OS arrives later this summer.

In its decision (PDF), the FTC acknowledges these changes in the mobile advertising marketplace and notes that it "reached this decision based on important developments in the mobile advertising marketplace, particularly actions by Apple that should mitigate the anticompetitive effects of Google's AdMob acquisition." According to the FTC, the acquisition of AdMob isn't likely to result in a "substantial lessening of competition."]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ftc_clears_googles_acquisition_of_admob.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/ftc_clears_googles_acquisition_of_admob.php Google Fri, 21 May 2010 09:42:13 -0800 Frederic Lardinois ad network AdMob has released its March report. Surprisingly, perhaps, the report notes that advertising traffic on the Android phone has surpassed that on the iPhone.

Android ad traffic in the U.S. was 46% in March of this year versus iPhone's 32%.

Although the fact that advertisers in the U.S. have elected to put more ads on Android than iPhone is a good indicator as to the desirability of that platform, Apple is still ahead of Google overall. Second quarter reports from Apple indicated that the company had sold 8.75 million iPhones in that three-month period. Android sold seven million in the whole of last year.

Top photo by Gene Wolf

Chances are that we will see slightly more fragmentation in the iPhone market later this year, once Apple releases version 4 of the iPhone OS, which won't support the first generations of the iPhone and iPod touch. In total, however, these first-generation devices only account for a small slice of all iPhone traffic (about 5%) and won't impact the overall statistics too much.

In the U.S. the Motorola Droid, HTC Dream and Motorola CLIQ are the most popular Android phones, while the HTC Hero is the most popular Android handset in the UK, followed by the HTC Dream and the HTC Magic.

While the HTC Droid was responsible for about 32% of all the Android traffic on AdMob's network, the Google Nexus One only drove about 2% of visitors in March 2010.

Looking at the overall market, AdMob also notes that the Android platform has seen rapid growth over the last year, with a compounded growth rate of about 32% since March 2009. Traffic on AdMob's own network is also up 18% month over month.

It's important to point out that these statistics are based on traffic to sites that feature AdMob's mobile advertising. AdMob's network is big enough to function as a good proxy for general trends in the mobile space, but it's always worth taking the exact numbers with a grain of salt.

AdMarvel, Opera and the iPhone

It's interesting to note that AdMarvel also offers an iPhone SDK for developers. At the time of the launch of the iPhone SDK, AdMarvel CEO described the iPhone as "an amazingly innovative platform." Opera hasn't announced any plans to bring its browser to the iPhone. When we talked to Opera's former CEO Jon von Tetzchner in December, he noted that the company wasn't averse to launching a browser on the iPhone, but Apple's App Store approval process was holding the company back from even trying to get an app into the store for the time being. It is worth noting, though, that Opera does offer an Android app.

Augmenting Revenue Streams Through Mobile Advertising

There can be little doubt that mobile advertising is one of the fastest growing markets in the mobile ecosystem. Google obviously wants a piece of this market through the AdMob acquisition. The company's own AdSense and AdWords programs offers mobile solutions, but the popularity of AdSense and AdWords hasn't really translated into success in the mobile space yet. Apple's acquisition of Quattro is a curious move, as advertising isn't exactly one of Apple's core competencies.

For Opera this move makes sense, though. Just like Apple hopes to profit directly from the iPhone apps and mobile sites that use Quattro, Opera will be able to profit from sites that use AdMarvel. Neither Apple nor Opera are traditional advertising companies, but both clearly believe that the mobile advertising market is poised for growth and that they can augment their current revenue streams by dipping their toes into this business.

In figures just released from mobile advertising company AdMob, the Droid singlehandedly boosted calls to their network by nearly 300 million requests while stats for HTC Magic devices remained static and those for HTC's Dream model actually decreased. In terms of consumer use of the network and acceleration of device popularity, it seems we have a winner.

AdMob's numbers show that requests from all Android-driven devices increased by 97 percent between October to December in 2009, totaling more than 1 billion requests in December alone.

The open platform has also seen a refreshing diversity of devices and manufacturers. AdMob shows that in December, 56 percent of requests were from HTC devices, 39 percent were from Motorola devices and 5 percent were manufactured by from Samsung. And in December, seven devices generated more than three percent of requests each: the Motorola Droid, HTC Dream, HTC Magic, HTC Hero, Motorola CLIQ, HTC Droid Eris and the Samsung Moment. This stat represents a significant increase from just three devices in October (HTC Dream, HTC Magic, and HTC Hero).

Already, the Motorola Droid is the leading Android device on AdMob's radar, generating a third of all the network's requests in December. Released just under two months ago, it's already the top-selling Android device on the market, a title it's held since a scant fortnight after its launch.

Granted, AdMob's metrics show a small slice of mobile device usage. But they've consistently been reliable in showing what mobile users use and need and in predicting trends. We are internally excited about what Android-powered devices will do in the market in the months to come, and I am personally quite optimistic about Droid adoption specifically.

Let us know what you think in the comments, particularly if you're a fanboy or fangirl of a particular device!

First, AdMob is a very strong company in a sector (mobile advertising) that everyone expects to become much more important in the future. Second, this is a chance to make a big move towards monetizing on Apple's iPhone platform while making sure that no one else does something similar to Android in the future.

AdMob is Strong in an Early Market

Apparently Google's mobile apps ad platform hasn't been doing so well, at least not compared to AdMob. AdMob has been growing fast. VentureBeat's Matt Marshall did some back of the envelope math and estimated that the company was pulling in $40m+ in annual revenue 18 months ago, which was just 18 months after it launched.

That was in a radically different time for the mobile market. As our own Sarah Perez wrote two weeks ago in a post about AdMob's latest mobile metrics report:

Believe it or not, it was only a year ago that the Motorola RAZR scored as the number one phone here in the U.S. while the iPhone was the only touchscreen device to even make the list of top ten handsets. Only a year later, and so much has changed.

That was durring the RAZR era that AdMob was at a pace that Matt Marshall said "looks headed to IPO-type revenues within three years."

Newspaper guy turned real-time, mobile content delivery founder at NozzlMedia Steve Woodward puts it like this:

"Google now has a way to extend its advertising dominance into mobile, which is growing faster than any other medium. Together, they have the delivery system, the analytics and the know-how to capture not only high-end advertising but also the medium and smaller business advertisers that Google caters to. It will be interesting to see how online publishers react, since a Google-AdMob network could sell ads at lower CPMs than its competitors, driving down revenue for publishers."

Planting a Flag on the iPhone, Protecting the Android Inventory

Now the iPhone rules. AdMob's own numbers claimed that mobile traffic from the iPhone and iPod touch grew 19X over the last year. AdMob is making a strong play on the iPhone. TechCrunch reported this Spring that the company claims to be the biggest mobile app ad network on the iPhone and is working on a traffic exchange system for app promotion similar to what's been done on Facebook.

Now move those efforts over into the Google column and Google is making money off of the free apps on Apple's platform. That's probably not something Apple feels great about.

Meanwhile, Google's own Android mobile OS is no slouch, either. Admob reported this Fall that Android now accounts for the 2nd largest share of mobile web traffic (far) behind the iPhone, at 17% in the US, beating RIM and Windows Mobile.

Does Google want to see someone else leading the ad monetization on its own mobile OS just like it is now poised to do to Apple? No way. The answer? Buy AdMob.

It's a very smart move. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Google's share price rose this morning to its highest point in almost 18 months.

The Indonesian mobile market has more than doubled in the last year and for a lot of users there, their mobile phones are the most important on-ramps to the Internet. As InMobi points out in its press release, strong competition among carriers has brought prices down and made mobile phones more affordable in the last year. While the BlackBerry is generally regarded as a business phone with a focus on email, it is currently beating the more web-centric iPhone in Indonesia when it comes to mobile web usage.

InMobi estimates that the average user in Indonesia generated 592 page views, while the global average is only about 250. About 80% of all the handsets sold in Indonesia are web-enabled - though most of them obviously don't give users access to the rich experience smartphones can offer.

As for BackBerry's lead in this market, it's important to note that AdMob's last metrics report from July (PDF) points out that both Apple and RIM only have a small share of the Indonesian handset market. BlackBerry currently holds the lead against Apple, though, and judging from InMobi's data, it looks like it also has the momentum to extend this lead.

The data about how iPhone users discover apps is quite interesting. It doesn't come as a surprise that most users are looking for a specific type of app, but it is also clear that the Top 25 lists in the store play a major role in most users' purchase decisions. 46% of all iPhone users rely on recommendations from friends, while about 20% find new apps through ads in other applications and about 19% base their download decisions on news articles and blog posts they have read.

Given the size of the store at this point, it only makes sense that users rely on popularity as a measure of quality. Sadly, the App Store doesn't allow users to organize apps by ratings. Judging from this data, any app that becomes a bestseller and reaches the Top 25 can probably look forward to a long life within this list.

How Many Apps Do They Use?

About 40% of all iPhone users use about 4 to 6 apps at least once a week. Only about 5% use more than 20 apps per week. Given how many apps most users download per month, these results validate some other reports we have seen which argue that most iPhone apps are disposable and are discarded after a few days of usage.

The Power of Brands

Being an ad company, AdMob also asked the survey respondents if they would download apps from well-known brands. Over 70% answered that they had already downloaded apps from brands and over 60% said that they would be interested in doing so.

As AdMob is more interested in selling ads than revenue from app sales, it makes sense that the company didn't differentiate between paid and free apps in this survey, though it would have been interesting to see more data about how much users pay for their apps on average and what percentage of the apps they downloaded was free.

Methodology

As always, it is important to note the methodology used for this survey. On August 6, AdMob recruited participants through ads in applications that use AdMob's advertising technology. Overall, AdMob received 190 responses from these ads, which the company feels is a significant sample size and provides a representative sample of the larger iPhone app market.

"Mobile advertising is rapidly maturing, and we believe the iPhone is leading the industry forward. Advertisers are excited to connect with consumers in new ways on the iPhone through social and rich media ad units that deliver increased impact and engagement," said AdMob VP/GM, Jason Spero. The new ads build on the high-performing iPhone ad units the
company launched last year and will begin running July 1st.

AdMob is also working with app developers to help them prepare for the new iPhone 3.0 OS. The company feels their new version of the iPhone SDK "delivers a better experience for consumers through the ability to dynamically update a given advertisement's look and feel, which in turn helps developers better monetize their applications," according to the company's press release.

As we reported last week, the iPhone/iTouch group of smart mobile devices accounted for 43 percent of ads served via mobile websites and 65 percent of ads served through HTML requests.

Results were based on user-generated requests for mobile ads during April 2009 as well as on a Gartner report on smartphone sales in Q4 2008.

So, in the smartphone category, which devices were most conducive to consumer interest in ads? We're sure advertisers are dying to know, but this also gives a good picture of browser usability and speed as well as connection reliability.

The iPhone/iTouch group led the pack with 43 percent of mobile web and 65 percent of HTML requests, all on an 8 percent share of the smartphone market. Devices with the Android OS represented less than one percent of the market but accounted for three percent of mobile web and nine percent of HTML ad requests. Though none of us here majored in higher maths, we see this as a sign that if Android devices can capture more of the smartphone market, they might be able to outstrip Apple devices in mobile web use.

The disappointing underacheiver of the report was undoubtedly the Symbian OS, which had 52 percent of the smartphone market but generated only 36 percent of mobile web and 7 percent of HTML requests. This is a fairly good indicator that the Symbian OS might - just might - not be bringing the Internet to life in its truest, most usable form. Satisfied users of Symbian-running devices are invited to rebut this speculation in the comments.

The top devices for web use were from Apple, Sony (the PSP), and HTC.

Overall, smartphones' use of the mobile web (again, according to AdMob) as compared to all mobile devices is up about 10 percent from last year. However, Apple devices' domination of the market has slipped slightly over the past five months, falling from 48 to 43 percent of mobile web use for smartphones.