Google has officially launched their Google Adsense for Mobile. For those whom are unfamiliar with the mobile space this is essentially the exact same thing as Google Adsense that’s available on the web but now on your mobile phone. Do you not use the mobile web? Well, 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. Seeing as how almost all of Google’s revenue is generated from web advertising I think it’s somewhat understandable that they have been a little anxious to get this service out to the public. This will be a nice sigh of relief for Google’s investors as this will definitely diversify their revenue stream to create a stronger business model. Ok, now you may be asking yourself one important question…

Do that many people use the mobile web to be exposed to these Google Ads? The audience is definitely available with about 6.6 billion people in the world and half that have mobile phone subscriptions. To Google’s advantage, the mobile web has no issues with ad blocking as of yet but that will surely change as the mobile web is more widely used and phones become more advanced. The mobile phone is becoming the world’s most popular location for information, which may sound crazy but there are more mobile devices in the world than personal computers and televisions combined. That’s a lot of phones right!

So this clearly seems like it can be a great long term plan, which I believe it is for right now. The mobile web is not that widely used and not all handsets offer that functionality. Consumers don’t all have unlimited data plans so it can become costly to consumers whom view these ads as they are on a mission for the content they set out for. Not all mobile web pages appear as they do on the iPhone believe it or not so not all users will have a great mobile web viewing experience. Here is a mock up of the new mobile service:

Actually, one interesting note is that only one ad will be available per page, which should prove beneficial to the advertiser in that most consumers don’t spend much more than 30 seconds on a single mobile web page. Why? The real estate is just not there. The content you’ll find on a mobile web site (at least a good one) will not be jammed with content. They should be very clean and to the point as viewing large amounts of content on a mobile screen can be rough. So why is that good for the advertiser? Well, if a consumer is only going to be on a page for approximately 30 seconds the chances of them seeing your ad decrease rapidly. Having the only presence on the site maximizes the chance for click through. I would have to imagine that due to this the CPM rates will most likely be lower.

To sum this up, I really think advertisers are going to have to be extremely patient with the mobile web and accept the low CPM and impressions to be be apart of the mobile game and stay on the cutting edge as much as possible until the market fully adopts the this new way of data consumption.

What do you think? Do you visit the mobile web often? Will you stop to check out the Google Ads? What are your thoughts?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Mobile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.