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Admob stops Linked List ads

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

From Aug 3rd Admob will no longer be offering ‘Linked List’ ads to publishers.  This adserving method consists of a simple link on the publisher’s page saying something like ‘Great Mobile Sites!’ which opens up an Admob mobile page filled with ads.

Admob Linked List ads

Admob Linked List ads

I have always been surprised that Admob offered this option, because it does not sit well with their policy that publishers should not incite people to click on ads on their site.  In this case, ads are being misrepresented as trusted links to other sites.  Of course when the user clicks on the link and is presented with a page full of ads, it is pretty obvious what they are, but that creates distrust from the user.  They won’t click on that link again, that’s for sure.  Admob’s advertisers probably did not realise that their ads were appearing on this page either.  So although the ad performance is likely to have been poor, this type of adserving should be stopped primarily for the sake of site integrity and the user experience.

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Admob no longer supports mediation layers for iPhone ads

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

AdMob iPhone publishers have been given 4 weeks to stop using ad network mediation layers such as AdWhirl and Tapjoy to monetize their iPhone apps. [Update: The deadline has now been extended to 5 August.] After this grace period, AdMob won’t serve them any more ads.

This is bad news for the mediation layers and bad news for the economics of the mobile advertising market. Most publishers do not have the time, resources or expertise to develop their own ad mediation and optimisation add-in for their apps. So they have to choose one provider and stick with them, or re-release their app every time they wish to change to a dfferent provider. AdMob is laser focused on becoming the iPhone and iPod Touch adserver of choice, and this step will push many publishers to choose AdMob, the network they know now, thus limiting the competition from other ad networks. There are plenty of other ad networks vying for a place on the iPhone screen, and it will be interesting to see how this decision affects AdMob’s share.

Here’s the full text of the email sent to publishers yesterday:

Dear AdMob Publisher,
I wanted to reach out to you to let you know that beginning on July 22, AdMob will no longer serve ads requested from iPhone apps that employ ad network mediation layers such as AdWhirl or Tapjoy. We originally had decided to work alongside mediation layers, but have found that a number of problematic trends have developed over the last several months including:
-Increased complaints from end users including ad rendering problems, increased latency, and ads with broken links.
-Increased technical issues with ad requests coming from mediation layers.
-Obstruction of some key parameters that we use to optimize ad serving and maximize publisher eCPM.
We will continue to support AdMob publishers who have developed their own logic to allow the use of multiple networks. We are providing a 4-week grace period for publishers to make the necessary adjustments before we stop supporting mediation layers. Please refer to our corporate blog for additional details or contact support@admob.com with any questions.
We believe this policy change is necessary to provide our publishers, advertisers, and end users with the best possible experience and results. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation.

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Oh right. Enter left, Microsoft.

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Microsoft finally seems to have a proper mobile advertising offer.  The new Bing search engine for mobile (could have been called ‘Ming’ but unfortunately didn’t make it past the committee) is now offering mobile search advertising, delivered via their mobile Bing search engine.  Time to get your skates on and start checking out the new kid on the block.  They may even have half a chance of beating Google at the mobile advertising game, given Google’s very disappointing performance in this space so far …

http://advertising.microsoft.com/mobile-advertising?s_cid=us_sp_mobm_62009

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Admoda drops Asia minimum bids, adds operator targeting in US, Thailand

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

Admoda has just informed its clients that they’ve dropped the minimum CPC bids in Asia as follows:  India – 0.005 GBP / Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, China and the rest of Asia – 0.0075 GBP.

This now makes them the ad network with the lowest minimum bid price of them all, with BuzzCity coming a close second with a minimum bid price of 0.01 USD in all countries around the world.  As an aside, Admoda is now practically the only ad network not pricing in US dollars so you’ll still get headaches trying to compare CPA against other providers.

Admoda have also added new network operator targeting in US and Thailand. US Operators now include: Alltel AT&T, Metro PCS, Nextel, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon and Virgin. Thailand operators now include: AIS, DTAC, and Truenet. They are also now getting over 450 Million ad requests in the US per month, and the minimum CPC bid is 0.03 GBP.

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BuzzCity campaign planner a step in the right direction for transparency

Monday, June 8th, 2009

Transparency is sorely lacking in the still immature mobile advertising ecosystem. Most mobile ad networks cannot even tell you the volume of impressions and clicks that they generate in a given country.  You have to rely on trial and error to discover what bang you’re gonna get for your buck. (As a sidenote, most ad networks price in US Dollars now so people can compare prices globally; shame they still think all advertisers live in the same timezone as they do too). And none of them can give you details about the segmentation of their network’s user base.

So it’s a breath of fresh air to see BuzzCity take some first steps in the right direction with the release of their Campaign Planner tool to help advertisers better understand the audience they are addressing and target their campaigns accordingly.  For any country you select, the campaign planner gives detailed information about the number of impressions per month, average campaign CPC, and a breakdown of traffic by mobile operator, device type and features, and even gender, age and more detailed location information where available.  However I suspect this information is based on the MyGamma social network which forms the core of the BuzzCity publisher network … but is not necessarily representative of total network traffic.buzz_campaign_planner_shot1

The next step is to let advertisers actually target their campaigns using the same criteria.  But this is difficult to do when many publishers on an ad network are unable to provide this information.  This will come with time.

In the meantime a simple but sorely needed step forward would be to actually calculate in advance the clicks that a campaign can be expected to generate in a given country for a given bid price.  All mobile ad networks have enough data to work this out.  Why not share it with advertisers so they can better understand the dynamics of the system?

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AdMob {heart} iPhone

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Admob continues to focus on building the premium end of their ad marketplace offer. And what better way to do that than enable richer, more engaging ads on devices owned by some of the most desirable target users in the world?

AdMob iPhone ad formats

They’ve not been achieving the prices they were hoping for six months ago because of an imbalance of supply and demand. In most countries – South Africa being a notable exception – mobile internet inventory, whatever the device, way outstrips advertiser demand, thus driving prices down. So the best way to drive prices up is to focus relentlessly on delivering higher impact, better targeted and more engaging ad campaigns for advertisers. And the iPhone is a great platform to achieve that whilst reaching out to a highly monetisable user base.

But for those of you more in the business of selling Ringtones than Land Rovers, who baulk at a 11-12 cent CPC price for iPhone ads, there are always text ads in ‘mobile developing’ countries still going at 3 cents per click.

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mKhoj now accepts ads in all languages

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

In a slightly over-hyped announcement, the mKhoj ad network sets its sights on global domination:

BANGALORE, India and PALO ALTO, Calif. May – June, 2009 – Today mKhoj, the leading mobile advertising marketplace for the rest of the world, announced the ability to power relevant mobile advertising tailored to local languages in seventeen different countries. With this announcement, mobile advertisers can leverage mKhoj’s ad network to display ads in hundreds of languages, including Afrikaans, Arabic, Bahasa, Hindi, Tamil, Turkic, and Zulu.

Gomo News even states that the company now ‘tackles local dialects’ with their ‘new mobile advertising service’.  What’s the new service?  Err… they implemented utf-8 character encoding.  It’s pretty much a standard requirement if you want to offer a multi-language internet service.

What actually matters is the ability to target the people that speak these languages – and expect a decent volume of responses.  In India, mKhoj’s home country, there are more than five local languages.  But you can only target by device and operator.  So if you create an ad for Hindi-speaking users, you’re going to get a lot of wasted impressions.

As for targeting Zulus, I’m sure there’s someone out there who wants to, but they’d better not get their hopes up too high yet …

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