Google [1] has announced that it’s buying mobile ad network AdMob [2], one of the leading companies for selling mobile advertising on smart phone platforms, for US$750 million in stock.
“Mobile advertising has enormous potential as a marketing medium, and while this industry is still in the early stages of development, AdMob has already made exceptional progress in a very short time,” Susan Wojcicki, Google’s vice- president of product management, said in a statement. “AdMob is the quintessential Silicon Valley startup – generating impressive year on year revenue growth.”
San Mateo, California-based AdMob’s talent and innovation were apparently a prime attraction for Google to add to its engineering team.
Since its launch, AdMob has served more than 125 billion mobile ads across a variety of platforms including iPhone and Android. AdMob’s ads consist of both banners and text links.
eMarketer has predicted that mobile will outpace online spending to reach close to $1.6 billion in 2012. The figure is expected to reach approximately $416 million this year.
When Google reported earnings last month, the company had $22 billion in cash, and Eric Schmidt, CEO, said his company felt “confident about investing heavily in our future.”
The deal is the third-largest acquisition in Google’s history, trailing the $3.1 billion paid for DoubleClick [3] and $1.65 billion paid for YouTube [4].