Mountain View, California — Smelling the ad dollars hidden inside the Redmond Vole’s WP7, search and advertising giant Google on Tuesday extended its AdMob beta SDK for Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 mobile operating system, empowering developers a new path to start integrating its advertising products into their applications, define where the ads appear and control what types of ad formats are shown.
Google Inc. had huge plans for AdMob when it purchased the mobile ad network for $750 million back in 2009 and now it is heartily opening up the platform for Windows Phone 7.
According to Google, the WP7 SDK supports both text and banner ads, complete with a series of post-click actions like opening a webpage or linking directly to Windows Phone Marketplace. The SDK is so customized offering control where the ads will appear and what kinds of ads are displayed.
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The search engine giant said that together with the new Windows Phone 7 SDK, Google updated its existing iOS and Android SDKs to include enhanced HTML5 support, enabling marketers to create richer, more absorbing ads. In addition, it has transformed the ad experience to give it the overall look and feel of Windows Phone 7 platform. The SDKs now support full-screen interstitial formats on tablets as well.
Furthermore, AdMob currently caters to more than 50,000 applications across Apple Inc.’s iOS, Google’s Android and Hewlett-Packard Co.’s webOS, Mark Schaaf, director of engineering on mobile ads at Google, wrote in a blog post announcing the news.
The inclusion of support for Windows Phone 7 could attract more developers to build apps for that platform. Some Windows Phone 7 developers, particularly those outside of the U.S., appear to have been eager to use AdMob. One created a way to integrate AdMob ads into applications and shared it with the community. Developers might be encouraged to port their applications to Windows Phone 7 if it is now easier to use the same ad system across all the platforms.
“We have also made efforts to personalize the ad experience for the look and feel of the Windows Phone 7 platform and make it easy for users to return to their application after engaging with the ad,” Schaaf wrote.
Moreover, Microsoft allows developers to use ads from its own ad platform but the capability is not yet available in all countries. That is one reason that developers have started using AdMob, even before Google officially extended support to them.
Nevertheless, the search engine titan controls roughly 59% of the U.S. mobile advertising market, according to data released late last year by research firm IDC. Google acquired AdMob for $750 million in 2009, finalizing the deal last May–in January, Google reported that the AdMob mobile advertising network now receives over 2 billion ad requests each day, more than quadrupling requests over the last year.
Developers can download the new SDK by logging into their AdMob account here.