Google to Acquire AdMob

I already saw this coming but didn’t thought it will be this soon. Email from AdMob (biggest mobile ad network in the world) states that they have reached an agreement with Google for a buy-out.

This is the full text from Omar Hamoui, founder of AdMob.

Today we announced that AdMob has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google for $750PHP 44,014INR 63,562EUR 714CNY 5,459 million. We are extremely excited about this new partnership and what it means for our publishers.

AdMob’s people, products and tools will continue to work to effectively monetize your mobile traffic – no interruptions. Our product and engineering teams will keep building great products for our customers. Our sales team will keep working with our thousands of advertisers to deliver successful campaigns.

After our deal closes, AdMob will work with Google to accelerate the pace of innovation in mobile and do an even better job for you. We believe this deal will benefit our developer and publisher partners by:

* Building even more powerful technology and tools to monetize mobile traffic.

* Increasing the effectiveness of display advertising on mobile devices by leveraging Google sales team, infrastructure and relationships.

* Improving the already high level of service and support we deliver to our publishers.

You can read more about this deal at www.admob.com/google.

Omar

AdMob is like the AdSense for mobile sites serving billions of mobile ad impressions per month. Google AdSense for Mobile has also been recently introduced by Google but hasn’t really taken off. Acquiring AdMob is the next logical step. I just didn’t image how much that traffic acquisition is.

I’ve been doing some consultancy for a number of start-ups for some time now and one of my biggest advise to them is to invest in the mobile web this early. Just last week, I told one of them that AdMob could be Google’s next target. I’m just surprised my prediction happened this soon.

According to AdMob, the Philippines ranked #5 on their mobile web ad traffic report, up from #9 or #10 a couple of years ago. And for the last 2 years, I’ve been trying to get hold of them so we can have them talk on our annual Search Engine Marketing Conference about the mobile web and advertising.