Google is taking its act on the road, offering up its AdSense program for delivering advertising to mobile phones and other devices…
“Search giant Google is increasing the amount of advertising it serves to mobile devices in an effort capture a rapidly growing market of Internet users who connect to the Web away from the desktop…”
San Francisco — Google Inc. expanded its widely used AdSense online advertising service on Monday to allow affiliated Web site publishers to target ads at Internet users on cell phones as well as computers.
The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company has now launched “AdSense for Mobile,” which will allow marketers to place contextual ads on sites capable of being viewed from mobile devices.
The program converts Web-based advertising into text that includes links to follow to the advertiser’s site. The messages are targeted to users contextually, meaning the content of the site they are viewing helps determine what ad is delivered.
The leader in computer-based Web search and advertising has begun allowing hundreds of thousands of affiliated Web sites that carry advertising sold by Google now to run contextual advertising targeted at mobile phone users.
“We have just launched AdSense for Mobile, which can help you expand your online content to new platforms,” said Alex Kenin, AdSense product marketing manager, in a blog post.
“With this program, advertisers can connect with the growing number of mobile publishers, ultimately providing users with an enhanced mobile experience that helps them find what they are looking for more quickly and efficiently on the go,” the company said in a published statement.
“If you have a Web site optimized for mobile browsers, or are interested in creating one, you can start monetizing your mobile site by accessing a growing number of our mobile advertisers,” Kenin said.
The long-anticipated move by Google lets Web site publishers begin generating ad revenue when consumers view ads on their sites via their mobile phones.
“Everything we have done in the PC area can be extended to mobile phones,” Dilip Venkatachari, product management director for Google AdSense for mobile phones, said in an interview. “The needs are similar.”
AdSense for Mobile is Google’s self-proclaimed effort to develop new ways for users to find the information they need anytime and anywhere, but the underpinning is advertising. Both versions of AdSense run on Google’s auction model and AdSense publishers earning money based on the number of ads clicked on by viewers.
“Mobile advertising is expected to generate about $3 billion by the end of the year and $19 billion by the end of 2011, according to ABI Research.”
Google has launched a mobile version of its AdSense program in several major markets, the latest in a series of high-profile moves that underscore the mounting interest in delivering marketing messages to mobile phones and other devices.
The mobile push comes amid rampant speculation that Google is working on software and other technology that would enable it to offer its own mobile phone. Dubbed the “Gphone,” the device’s existence has been widely downplayed from inside the Googleplex.
In addition to the Gphone rumors, Google has said it might be interested in paying at least US$4.6 billion for the right to acquire some of the high-end wireless spectrum to be auctioned off by the Federal Communications Commission early next year.
The potential opportunities for Google’s new AdSense for Mobile are clearly vast, with Frost & Sullivan estimating that the mobile advertising market in the U.S. alone will generate $2.12 billion in revenue by 2011 compared to $301 million in 2006.
“Google’s ad revenue is expected to top $15 billion this year and nearly all of that comes from the AdSense program.”
“The mobile advertising market is certainly in the early stages,” Venkatachari said. “We are making it (financially viable) for new sources of mobile content to emerge,” he said.
“The effects of all that is that we will see rapid adoption” of advertising on mobile phones, Venkatachari added.
He declined to put a timeline on growth in mobile Internet advertising, but said Google was deriving “meaningful revenue” from its own search, mapping other services on mobile phones.
However, Google’s ability to profit from mobile advertising will depend largely on how much it knows about those viewing its mobile ads and the extent to which it can convert that knowledge into ad targeting data.
While telecom companies typically know a great deal about their subscribers, they tend not to share that information without compensation, if at all. That leaves Google to either make deals with telecom partners or to deepen its own data about those using its services both on the Internet and mobile devices.
Still, there is little doubt that Google is eager to extend its Web search and contextual advertising dominance to the next logical step, the mobile devices often referred to as the third screen — after the TV and the personal computer.
“While Google has already been partnering to get its search software on mobile devices, AdSense for Mobile is more of a direct push.”
Google is currently offering AdSense for Mobile in 13 countries: England, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Ireland, Russia, Netherlands, Australia, India, China, and Japan (in a few weeks).