But here’s the counterpoint: Search — which means Google — appears to be doing just fine.

Citigroup’s Mark Mahaney has been checking with search marketers, who tell him that Q4 looks a whole lot like the rest of 2011, except maybe a bit better: “Our panel is tracking U.S. Search spend to be up between 15% and 27% Y/Y, rates that are largely in-line with or faster than Q1-Q3 trends.”

Mahaney notes that Efficient Frontier, the search marketer Adobe plans on buying, says its Q4 numbers show a “slight deceleration” from the rest of the year. But compared to the sour faces I’ve seen from some ad guys in recent weeks, that’s fine.

Also of note: Mahaney says that mobile advertising, which has generated lots of hype but not that many dollars, may finally be here, at least when it comes to search. There’s a “a clear consensus that Mobile Search spend is becoming material,” he writes, and will account for 10 percent or more of many search buyers’ spend.

EBay says it has acquired the technology and team behind the Gifts Project, a social commerce platform that enables multiple friends to pitch in — or contribute a particular sum — toward an item for a birthday or other event.

The Gifts Project has been powering eBay’s version of the concept called Group Gifts for almost a year. The Tel Aviv-based company is backed by angel investors and Gemini Israel Fund and Index Ventures.

Going forward, the Gifts Project will become eBay’s Israel Social Center, which will focus on building social shopping platforms and product features for eBay Marketplaces. The Gifts Project’s employees will remain with the company, including co-founders Ron Gura, who will head up the Social Center; Matan Bar, who will become head of product; and Erez Dickman, the head of engineering.

The Gifts Project will report to eBay’s new VP of social commerce, Don Bradford, who joined eBay in May after working at both Microsoft and Yahoo.

Along with several other major retailers and start-ups, eBay has conducted a handful of experiments to determine what social commerce is, and how best to leverage shopping on social networks, like Facebook.

So far, eBay’s social efforts have been limited.

Besides group gift-buying, eBay has been developing ways for a consumer to log in to his or her Facebook account on eBay’s homepage and get product recommendations based on past purchasing habits. Another feature expected to launch sometime this year will allow users to post multiple products to their Facebook pages, to get their friends to vote on which item they should buy.

Earlier this summer, Christopher Payne, the head of North America for eBay, told me: “Social is a top-level initiative. It’s something that leaders are spending a considerable amount of energy on.”

Besides social commerce, mobile has also been a high-level priority for eBay and PayPal. The company has acquired Milo, which aggregates the availability of products in retail stores; Zong, which is a mobile payments provider; and Where, a mobile advertising company.

Beyond the iPhone, though, the landscape has shifted significantly in the past couple of years, according to quarterly studies from Millennial Media. Not surprisingly, Google’s Android has seen the strongest growth among operating systems. In its most recent report, being released on Friday, more than two-thirds of the top advertising targets are Android phones and the entire Top 20 list is made up of smartphone models.

Back in 2009, there was just one Android model on the list — the T-Mobile G1 — and the list included more feature phones than smartphones. Millenial ranks the devices based on the number of ad impressions delivered to each.

One surprise is that, despite Research In Motion’s challenges of late, its BlackBerry Curve remains the second-biggest deliverer of ad impressions, trailing only Apple’s iPhone.

On the manufacturer side, Apple has grown considerably, with the iPhone now making up more than 30 percent of ad impressions, up from just over 11 percent in 2009. Samsung, which delivered 20 percent of ad impressions and topped the list in 2009, is now in second place with just under 15 percent. Research In Motion, meanwhile, now accounts for 11.76 percent of ads served, up from 9.82 percent in 2009, allowing the BlackBerry maker to move into the No. 3 spot among device makers.

That said, the folks at mobile ad firm JumpTap have put together a nifty U.S. map dividing the country into states dominated by Google and those by Apple, as well as some states still quite loyal to Ross Perot — I mean the BlackBerry.

“As advertisers increasingly look to combine mobile and local to help them reach consumers, we decided to examine the regionality of Android, and see where the true Android patriots reside,” JumpTap said in its report.

States with more than a typical number of Android users are shown in yellow, while those with more than typical iPhone usage are shown in blue. Though not on the map, Hawaii is an iPhone state, while Alaska has more of both Android-based phones and iPhones than the typical state. New York was among the states leaning BlackBerry.

“There’s a clear pattern of Android over-indexing in the South and Southwest parts of the country, with iOS doing well in the Northeast and Midwest states,” JumpTap said in its report.

Android did particularly well in California, Texas and Florida, which have a lot of electoral votes, so those might be places where Apple needs to do some campaigning.

For those who didn’t get a chance to see those chats with Google’s Jason Spero and AOL’s David Temkin, both are now available for your Web-viewing pleasure, so I thought I would do a post pointing you in their direction. (Hey, we’re nothing if not full-service here at AllThingsD.)

If you are really, really lazy, here are the highlights:

In addition to bemoaning missing the Women’s World Cup soccer semifinals, Spero and I naturally talked about the opportunities and challenges on the ad side of the mobile business. On the plus side, Spero said that mobile ad rates have held relatively steady even with a huge increase in volume, something he called a fairly significant accomplishment. The quality of those ads, he acknowledged, remains a top issue for Google.

“If you look backwards, we have made enormous strides in quality,” Spero said. “But it continues to be the absolute No. 1 investment area … Frankly, if we don’t do it, we are going to decrease click-through rates.”

We also chatted about how his view on Apple versus Android has changed since joining Google, as well as the privacy challenges relating to location-based services.

As for Temkin, I began by asking him whether in fact AOL has a mobile strategy (doing my best to channel my inner Kara Swisher). He then quipped that it had something to do with mailing out smartphones with DVDs giving 10 hours of free usage, before getting into the company’s real strategy in mobile.

AOL, Temkin said, has passed Microsoft to become the No. 4 mobile destination on the Web, behind only Google, Facebook and Yahoo. “We’re doing pretty well on mobile,” he said, noting that it is not just about AOL.com but also its subbrands, such as Engadget, Moviefone and Stylelist.

He also talked about some of the company’s new “mobile-first” initiatives, including a music application called Play by AOL and a forthcoming online magazine, Editions by AOL. Plus, I got a chance to abuse him by playing the old AOL dial-up tone a couple times. The video is worth watching for that bit of nostalgia alone.

Jason Spero interview:

David Temkin interview (split into two parts):

Part 2:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110729/talking-mobile-with-googles-jason-spero-and-aols-david-temkin/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110727/american-express-hires-googler-as-ceo-for-flash-sales-joint-venture/ http://allthingsd.com/20110727/american-express-hires-googler-as-ceo-for-flash-sales-joint-venture/#comments Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:29:08 +0000 Tricia Duryee http://allthingsd.com/?p=103166 Vente-privee.com, a French-owned flash sales site with about 13 million members and more than $1 billion in European sales, has formed a joint venture with American Express to enter the U.S., and today it appointed former Google executive Mike Steib as CEO.

At Google, Steib was most recently Director of Video Advertising for the Americas region, and before that had led Google’s Americas business teams for its emerging ad products, including Mobile Ads, Local Ads and Commerce.

The joint venture is expected to launch late this year, and, like its counterpart in France, will offer designer apparel at low prices for limited amounts of time to people who sign up for a free membership.

Back in May, when the joint venture was announced, the two companies said they will be equal partners, but the terms of the deal were not disclosed, such as the size of the investment or the kinds of resources the companies would be required to contribute.

In the U.S., the company will be competing against other flash sales sites, such as Gilt Groupe, Rue La La and ideeli.

Before joining Google, Steib was the General Manager of Strategic Ventures at NBC Universal, and also served a stint as VP in the NBC Corporate Development group.

The agency said on a notice on its Web site Thursday that groups have until July 11 to send suggestions on how its original guidelines on online advertising disclosures should be updated to address new technologies, such as those used to target ads to users’ interests and mobile advertising.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

That said, new numbers from Millennial Media offer up an interesting take–just how are the smartphone leaders doing in terms of making money for others. The report looks at both how many ads are being viewed on various devices as well as how much app revenue is being generated via the various smartphone operating systems.

In terms of advertising impressions, Android is the clear leader, with devices running that operating system accounting for nearly half of all ad impressions shown last month. Measured on that basis, 14 of the top 20 devices run Android, though the iPhone still tops the list and the BlackBerry Curve is the second most common phone model.

However, in terms of app revenue by platform, the numbers are largely reversed, with iOS apps generating 47 percent of revenue, as compared to 36 percent of revenue generated by Android apps. BlackBerry apps accounted for 7 percent of sales, while WebOS, Windows Phone, Symbian and other operating systems combined for just 10 percent of app revenue.

The report is chock full of other interesting stats as well.

For example, non-phone devices such as the iPad, iPod Touch and Galaxy Tab are seeing strong ad growth. The number of ads seen on such devices grew 21 percent month-over-month and such devices now make up 17 percent of the total mobile ad market, as compared to 64 percent for smartphones and 19 percent for feature phones.

The iPhone, meanwhile, saw its number of ad impressions grow 17 percent from a month earlier, amid adoption of the Verizon iPhone, which now accounts for 8.2 percent of ads shown to iPhones.

The report also breaks out ad impressions based on the type of phone. On that basis, 59 percent of ads were viewed on touch-screen only devices, 17 percent on models with both a keyboard and touchscreen, 13 percent on phones with a keyboard but no touchscreen and 11 percent on those sad little phones that have only a traditional phone keypad.

That’s the conclusion from a new Gartner forecast that predicts mobile apps will produce $15 billion in revenue from sales and advertising this year–nearly triple last year’s still-not-shabby $5.2 billion.

“Many are wondering if the app frenzy we have been witnessing is just a fashion, and, like many others, it shall pass. We do not think so,” Gartner research director Stephanie Baghdassarian said in a statement. “We strongly believe there is a sizable opportunity for application stores in the future.”

The company sees that revenue reaching a whopping $58 billion by 2014. (The forecast covers apps that are directly sold and not other kinds of media content such as ringtones and wallpapers.)

However, Baghdassarian noted that the challenge from Web-based apps will intensify as mobile browsers improve and the Web adapts to the growing base of Web-savvy phones.

“Applications will have to grow up and deliver a superior experience to the one that a Web-based app will be able to deliver,” Baghdassarian said. “Native apps will survive the Web enhancements only when they will provide a more-personal and richer experience to the ‘vanilla’ experience that a Web-based app will deliver.”

Advertising is poised to become a bigger piece of the revenue, Gartner said, climbing to nearly a third of revenue from apps by 2014, roughly double last year’s 16 percent.

Apple announced this week that 10 billion iPhone apps had been downloaded from its store. Apple’s lead in the store arena is poised to continue, but narrow in the coming years, Gartner said.

“We estimate that Apple’s App Store drove close to nine application downloads out of 10 in 2010 and will remain the single best-selling store across our forecast period (through 2014), although to a lesser extent, as other stores manage to gain momentum,” said Gartner Vice President Carolina Milanesi.

But San Francisco-based Greystripe, a mobile ad network, says there’s a bigger opportunity in selling brand advertising when you take a slightly larger view.

“When we looked at the market for local and hyper-local, there’s no brand play there. We asked ourselves, how do you get rich media into a hyper-local experience? It’s not obvious, but the big place for the brands to place ads is at the regional local level,” said Greystripe’s CEO Michael Chang.

To that end, Greystripe is announcing a strategic partnership with Media Networks, Inc., a Time Inc. company, which goes by MNI for short.

Greystripe will leverage MNI’s 80-person sales team, which was focused exclusively on local buys online to sell mobile ads, while MNI will rely on Greystripe’s expertise in mobile and inventory of mobile applications and Web sites. It’s the first time MNI has moved into mobile, and for Greystripe, it will represent a significant expansion beyond its 12-person sales team.

Chang said even though you see local plays, like Groupon and LivingSocial raising billions of dollars, the regional play is not to be forgotten. The hyper-local guys, he says, are often going after the same dollars allocated to the Yellow Pages, whereas there’s a separate bucket for big brands wanting to advertise locally.

Examples include a car dealership that covers a whole region, a hospital that treats patients in an entire county or a McDonald’s franchise that owns multiple locations.

“It’s not so fine grain,” he said.

Facebook confirmed the acquisition in a statement: “We’re excited to confirm that we recently completed a talent acquisition of Rel8tion, a stealth-mode startup in Seattle. The engineering team will join our growing Seattle office, and we’re looking forward to having them on board.”

Rel8tion was started in part by Peter Wilson, who has dabbled in just about every major company that has set up shop in Seattle.

In addition to his responsibilities at Rel8tion, he was spending one day a week assisting Facebook with setting up its Seattle office. He will now be an engineering director.

Prior to that, Wilson was an engineering director at Google for four years, helping to ramp up Google’s Kirkland, Wash.-based engineering center. He also spent nine years at Microsoft, working on Microsoft Windows, XP, MSN and Visual Studio in a variety of roles.

There’s not much information about the company, but according to the little information available on its site, it was trying to create a system for synching up a person’s location and demographics with the most relevant ad inventory.

A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment on the role the Rel8tion employees would play at the company, or on the terms of the deal.

Another founder, Scott Hannan, was previously a consultant for Microsoft, and worked as VP of Business Development at Pelago–which operates the mobile social network Whrrl–and Nat Brown, who is listed as the company’s CTO. Brown was previously VP of Technology at Myspace in Seattle and CTO of iLike.

Despite Facebook having a gigantic mobile audience, it has yet to monetize that traffic through advertising. With its introduction of Facebook Places, which allows users to check-in at local establishments and find local deals, you can only expect more is coming.

While both Apple and Google have made big bets in mobile advertising with large acquisitions of Quattro Wireless and AdMob, respectively, this can’t really be put in the same category given its relative size.

A top executive at Angry Birds creator Rovio says that it is still hard to make money selling apps for Google’s operating system and that Apple’s iPhone is likely to remain the top mobile destination for some time.

In an email interview with Technmarketing.com, Peter Vesterbacka praised Apple’s approach.

“Apple will be the number one platform for a long time from a developer perspective, they have gotten so many things right,” he said. “And they know what they are doing and they call the shots. Android is growing, but it’s also growing complexity at the same time. Device fragmentation not the issue, but rather the fragmentation of the ecosystem. So many different shops, so many different models. The carriers messing with the experience again. Open but not really open, a very Google centric ecosystem. And paid content just doesn’t work on Android.”

That said, he added that there is clearly room for both approaches. Even the muted criticism of Android is interesting given that Google was clearly trying to ride the Angry Birds’ coattails, citing the game as an Android developer success story in a recent YouTube video.

As for the other mobile platforms, Vesterbacka told the online publication that things are less clear as far as who the winners and losers will be.

“Besides Apple and Google, it will be interesting to see how long it will take for Nokia to get their act together,” he said. “MeeGo is clearly the future there, remains to be seen how big and how soon. HP-Palm WebOS is a really cool OS and has been a pleasure developing for that one, but the volume is irrelevant for the time being. Everything else is more or less ‘interesting’ right now, ie no real business to be had, at least not yet.”

In an interview earlier this month, Vesterbacka told Mobilized that the company is planning to do a Windows Phone 7 version of Angry Birds next year.

You’d have to search a long time to find someone who’s been closer to the evolution of Google than Susan Wojcicki. It was in her rented garage that Sergey Brin and Larry Page launched the company, which she joined in 1999.

Today, while much of the attention on Google focuses on Android or Chrome, Gmail or YouTube, Wojcicki oversees the operations from which Google generates the bulk of its revenue and profits: AdWords, AdSense and DoubleClick among them. And in October she was made one of Google’s eight senior vice presidents.

She’s lately been quoting research from Forrester, which found that while 42 percent of people do research online before buying something, only 7 percent of those purchases happen online. Mobile advertising, she has argued recently, can help bridge that gap. Expect lots of discussion around that stemming from last year’s $750 million acquisition of mobile advertising firm AdMob.

Meanwhile, let’s be honest: Everyone wants to know what really happened between Google and Groupon.

Liveblog

8:36 am: Everyone is seated in the ballroom, and the session with Wojcicki is about to start.

8:39 am: Walt and Kara have come out onto the stage, thanking the audience for their support at big D and this week at D: Dive Into Mobile.

Before Wojcicki comes to the stage, they are introducing the new writers at All Things Digital:

• Liz Gannes, NetworkEffect
• Ina Fried, Mobilized
• Tricia Duryee, eMoney
• Arik Hesseldahl, NewEnterprise
• Drake Martinet

8:43 am: Walt and Kara hand the stage off to Peter Kafka, who will be conducting the interview with Susan Wojcicki.

8:44 am: We’re getting started. Peter Kafka is interviewing Susan. She says when she first rented to Larry and Sergey, they weren’t allowed to come in the front door.

8:45 am: Susan: I charged them $1,700 a month in rent.

8:45 am: Peter: Let’s start with mobile. It’s a big business but small for Google at $1 billion. Break out that billion dollars.

Susan: We don’t break it out. But they are all growing. To give you an idea of the growth, we saw a 4x increase year over year in the number of searches. AdMob has doubled, and is doing more than a billion ad requests per day.

8:48 am: Mobile brings an opportunity not just to bring people to a Web site but to a store. We just did something with Google Ad Goggles, with Buick, where you can see a magazine ad, scan and that takes you to an ad site.

8:51 am: Peter: In-app advertising is a small opportunity, but Google owns it.

Susan: We’d like to have everyone be an advertiser. We think about having very mobile-specific campaigns.

Our barriers to entry are a lot lower than those at Apple. We offer all the formats like video. We want it to be easy to advertise, we have a lot of systems that measure quality.

8:52 am: Peter: Who’s running AdMob day to day? Original management has left.

Susan: We’ve taken different parts of it and integrated it into our advertising and sales organizations. [Former AdMob CEO] Omar [Hamoui] has left for personal reasons, but pretty much most of the staff who joined with AdMob have stayed. The goal is how do we continue to innovate on that platform.

Peter: Do you view the phone differently from a privacy standpoint than on the PC?

Susan: I think the phone is a really personal device in a lot of ways. If you drop your phone or lose it there’s a moment of panic. On the other hand there’s a lot of control that users have.

8:57 am: Peter: You guys and the rest of the ad industry are telling Washington that they will self-regulate around privacy. FTC says that’s not going to fly, and they want something like an opt-out browser.

Susan: Google is a consumer brand and people need to be comfortable. If we were just an advertising brand we wouldn’t have the same concerns. We’ve always tried to promote transparency and choice among our users. We didn’t have a cookie on the AdSense network until about a year ago. There were a lot of things we couldn’t do.

8:58 am: Susan: We’re always interested in what’s being proposed. We’ll always participate in any discussion around proposals to improve privacy for users.

8:59 am: Peter: Do you think users really care about this? They’ll say they care if you ask them. Practically, do they really care?

Susan: People care. They also want to have good content. And they want the advertising to be relevant. We see advertising as information, and as long as we can make that information useful, the better it is.

9:01 am: Susan: We’ve had ads in Gmail since Gmail first launched. Ads get a bad reputation sometimes because theyr’e not useful. They’re not relevant, or slow. If you’re planning a trip to Hawaii, and see ads that are related to that, that’s useful information.

9:02 am: Susan: The moment that our products are not as good, people will go somewhere else.

Peter: So you were employee No. 18; now there are 23,000 employees at Google. Talk about how the culture has changed over time.

Susan: Google is a much bigger company obviously. We’ve tried to have a lot of different divisions and groups and have given them autonomy. Our display group is run like a separate group within Google.

The secret is to break into groups that are manageable, and give them as much autonomy as possible.

9:05 am: Peter: What are we to read into the fact that you’re offering employees bonuses to stay at the company?

Susan: Our employees are really valuable to us. They are basically our business. Google has been doing well. As much as possible we’re trying to share back with the employees. They will continue to create a lot of value.

9:06 am: Peter: If you’re coming to Google as a hot young engineer out of Stanford, what’s the most compelling thing you can say to bring them on board?

Susan: Google’s scale and platform. If you have a passion, and want to get things done. [Cites Andy Rubin, and the scale he's working at now vs. when Android was a start-up.] When you do something, it matters.

9:07 am: Peter: You guys were talking to Groupon. That deal has now gone away. [Asks about integrating companies into the Google culture.]

Susan: Each deal is different and you have to consider how best to integrate them.

9:09 am: Peter: What’s the product you’re most excited about?

Susan: Mobile ads. How can we enable you, when you’re walking around, to find out the best local offers around? As an advertiser, how can I find out if someone saw my ad and went to a store?

The local market is a huge market, we’ve always wanted to be in it.

9:09 am: Now going into Q&A from the audience.

9:13 am: Q: What do you view as being so hard about local?

Susan: The reason local is hard is because it needs to be simple. For small businesses, they don’t have a lot of time. You need to create a model that works for them. And it needs to be easy for them to sign up. On the back end, everything needs to just work for them.

9:15 am: And we’re done!

A video posted to YouTube has Rovio’s “Mighty Eagle” Peter Vesterbacka talking about, among other things, how an ad-based model can work to generate serious bucks. Off camera, Vesterbacka told Google that the company expects that by the end of the year, its ad-supported Angry Birds will be bringing in over $1 million per month. There have been more than five million downloads of the ad-supported Android version to date.

“It seems to be a very good fit,” he said. “We’re very happy with the monetization that provides us.”

Google is using the spot as the first in a series of YouTube videos to tout ways of establishing ad-based mobile businesses. Of course, the Angry Birds lesson is really more one of coming up with a hit game. Create a hit that everyone wants to play and you can find lots of ways to make money. That’s just a truism.

Vesterbacka did throw out a few interesting stats, such as the fact that 80 percent of everyone who downloads Angry Birds also downloads updates when they are available. Also, on just the iPhone version of Angry Birds, Vesterbacka said that there are 65 million minutes per day spent playing the game.

Plus, about four minutes into the video below, Vesterbacka works in a cute plug for the company’s forthcoming line of toys.

In the case of Apple (AAPL), that means reading the new 45-page privacy policy that comes with the iOS 4 update and finding the section about cookies.

Actually, you don’t have to do that–iLounge already highlighted it for us:

Apple and its partners use cookies and other technologies in mobile advertising services to control the number of times you see a given ad, deliver ads that relate to your interests, and measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns. If you do not want to receive ads with this level of relevance on your mobile device, you can opt out by accessing the following link on your device: http://oo.apple.com. If you opt out, you will continue to receive the same number of mobile ads, but they may be less relevant because they will not be based on your interests. You may still see ads related to the content on a web page or in an application or based on other non-personal information. This opt-out applies only to Apple advertising services and does not affect interest-based advertising from other advertising networks.

So that’s pretty much the same tack that Google (GOOG), Yahoo (YHOO) and other big Web ad players (not Facebook, though) have taken to ad targeting and privacy: If you don’t want to see targeted ads, you don’t have to see targeted ads. But you’re still going to see ads. And figuring out how to opt out of targeting will take a little bit of doing (here are the opt-out pages for Google and Yahoo, which they describe as ad “managers”).

Note that this deals only with Apple’s homegrown ad network, not third-party outfits like Medialets or Millenial Media. Then again, Apple isn’t giving the biggest mobile ad network, Google’s AdMob, access to targeting data at all.

As others have noted, Apple’s same privacy policy doesn’t give iPhone users any choice when it comes to location data on their phones–it is tracking their location and reserves the right to share it with “partners and licensees.”

Whether or not that creeps you out likely depends on your attitude toward services like Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter: If you spend your time broadcasting your status to the world, it’s hard to get riled up about Apple keeping tabs on you, too.

But if you’re a private soul, Apple offers this promise: “This location data is collected anonymously in a form that does not personally identify you and is used by Apple and our partners and licensees to provide and improve location-based products and services.”

Feel better? Okay, how about this–Steve Jobs at D8, promising to protect users’ privacy:

We’ve always had a very different view of privacy than some of our colleagues in the Valley. We take privacy extremely seriously. That’s one of the reasons we have the curated apps store. We have rejected a lot of apps that want to take a lot of your personal data and suck it up into the cloud.

Privacy means people know what they’re signing up for. In plain English, and repeatedly, that’s what it means. Ask them. Ask them every time. Make them tell you to stop asking if they get tired of your asking them. Let them know precisely what you’re going to do with their data.

That’s a pretty straightforward, simple proposition, much more so than Apple’s confusing legalese. If Apple really wants to appease privacy worriers, the company ought to update its policy with words that sound like the ones Jobs spoke earlier this month.

Full text of AdMob boss Omar Hamoui’s response is below. But there’s not a lot more to it than that. What else can he say?

Hamoui notes, correctly, that Apple’s policy will limit the choices of the developers it is trying to woo to its platform: They’ll be able to use Apple’s iAds and ads from independent ad networks, but not from the biggest player in the market.

And since the point of iAds, per Apple (AAPL), is to make money for its developers–Steve Jobs says the ad business won’t be meaningful for his company’s P&L–then you’d think he would want as much choice as possible. But as I’ve noted before, Apple has repeatedly limited choice–and revenue–in pursuit of other goals. So this can’t be a total shock.

Apple’s new policy may also dampen investment in the mobile-ad business, or at least parts of it. Since Apple is allowing only “independent” ad companies to transmit data, it makes it a lot harder for those companies–Greystripe, Millenial, and Medialets, for starters–to sell themselves to big mobile players like Microsoft (MSFT), Research In Motion (RIMM), Palm (PALM)/Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), etc.

But it may be hard for Google (GOOG) and AdMob to get to worked up about Apple’s policy, since Apple has already done them a huge solid. The company’s entry into the ad market helped persuade federal regulators to bless Google’s $750 million purchase of the mobile ad network, a deal that appeared to be in jeopardy for quite some time. Steve Jobs giveth, and Steve Jobs taketh.

Mobile advertising and the iPhone
June 9th, 2010

Apple proposed new developer terms on Monday that, if enforced as written, would prohibit app developers from using AdMob and Google’s advertising solutions on the iPhone. These advertising related terms both target companies with competitive mobile technologies (such as Google), as well as any company whose primary business is not serving mobile ads. This change threatens to decrease–or even eliminate–revenue that helps to support tens of thousands of developers. The terms hurt both large and small developers by severely limiting their choice of how best to make money. And because advertising funds a huge number of free and low cost apps, these terms are bad for consumers as well.

Let’s be clear. This change is not in the best interests of users or developers. In the history of technology and innovation, it’s clear that competition delivers the best outcome. Artificial barriers to competition hurt users and developers and, in the long run, stall technological progress.

Since I started AdMob in 2006, I have watched competition in mobile advertising help drive incredible growth and innovation in the overall ecosystem. We’ve worked to help developers make money, regardless of platform–iPhone, Android, Palm Pre, Blackberry, Windows, and others. In the past four years, AdMob has helped tens of thousands of developers make money and build real businesses across multiple operating systems.

I’ve personally worked with many iPhone app developers around the world, including one who created a fun and simple game in the early days of the App Store. He built the app because he was interested in the challenge. He built this single app into a multi-million dollar advertising revenue stream with AdMob, hired a whole team, and turned a hobby into a real business.

We see these stories all the time.  We want to help make more of them, so we’ll be speaking to Apple to express our concerns about the impact of these terms.

Omar

Newest example: The software company, along with mobile ad network Greystripe, says it will be creating ads in HTML5 that work on the iPhone and iPad’s Flash-free Safari browser.

The pitch is that advertisers and their agencies can continue to create ads using Flash, the Web’s dominant platform for ad delivery, but that Greystripe will port the ads to Apple-friendly formats.

Apple (AAPL) has banned this kind of cross-compiling for iPad and iPhone apps. But it’s kosher for ads, Greystripe CEO Michael Chang tells me; he says Greystripe has already been doing this for in-app ads on the iPhone. The news here is that his company and Adobe (ADBE) are now trying to get Flash ads back onto Apple’s browsers.

Assuming this does work, that’s good news for Greystripe and Adobe (ADBE). But everyone in the mobile ad business got a lift last week, when Jobs made a point of saying that he didn’t intend to lock out other ad networks from the iPad and iPhone–and that he’d let them use some tracking information from the devices in the process.

When Google first announced its acquisition of mobile advertising outfit AdMob (see adjacent graph and text; click to enlarge), the company said it didn’t anticipate regulatory concerns but wouldn’t be surprised if there was some regulatory review.

A reasonable stance given the Obama administration’s stated concerns about Google’s domineering presence in the market for Internet search advertising. Prescient, too, because according to The Wall Street Journal, the Federal Trade Commission is indeed reviewing the $750 million acquisition. The FTC once-over is said to be largely procedural, and there’s no indication that the agency has found anything over which to take issue.

And the Commission may not find anything. At this point, the mobile ad market is far too immature and fragmented for Google (GOOG) to really undermine competition–even with the 30 to 40 percent share of the mobile ad market the acquisition of AdMob will give it.

That said, by purchasing AdMob, the search sovereign will become the Internet’s largest mobile advertising company, which could conceivably be its first step toward becoming a mobile ad monopoly.

Google has not yet responded to a request for comment.

The latest: An announcement that advertisers who buy AdWords–Google’s main revenue engine–can now automatically buy mobile advertising, too. The company says AdWords buyers can choose to have their AdWords automatically show up on phones that support “real” Internet browsers like T-Mobile’s G1 phone and Apple’s (AAPL) iPhone. Here’s an example:

These ads will reach a relatively small slice of mobile phone users. But that population will increase rapidly, particularly if Apple really does start selling cut-price phones at Wal-Mart (WMT). Which means that Google (GOOG) really may be the first company to make inroads toward the supposedly-huge-but-so-far-mythical mobile ad market.

Release from Google’s Daniel Rubin:

Today, we’re announcing a new campaign-level option that allows you to extend the reach of your text and image ads to show your AdWords ads on the T-Mobile G1, the iPhone, and other mobile devices that have full (HTML) Internet browsers. This new option will now allow you to display your ads specifically on these devices, create exclusive campaigns for them, and get separate performance reporting. We hope this option will help you more effectively reach your audience with the right message at the right time.

G1 and iPhone ads have many of the same benefits as our standard mobile-format ads, such as allowing you to deliver mobile-specific calls-to-action and reaching your audience when they’re on the go. Showing ads on the G1 and iPhone also have additional advantages for your advertising. Users are performing a lot of searches on these devices, and searches are likely to go up during the holiday season. Last Christmas, the iPhone drove more traffic to Google.com worldwide than any other mobile platform.

Unlike standard mobile ads, you don’t need to format your ads for mobile phones to show your ads on the G1 and iPhone. Because the G1 and iPhone has full Internet browsers, you’ll be able to display your standard AdWords ads and landing pages on these devices without having to modify them.

With this new option, you’re opted-in to show ads on the G1 and iPhone, and you’re also eligible to show on additional devices that use full Internet browsers as these devices enter the market. If you want to change your settings to only show ads on G1s and iPhones or to not show ads on these devices, follow these steps.

If you’re running standard mobile ad formats, they won’t be affected, and they’ll continue to run on mobile phones with mobile (WAP) browsers.”

What can we expect from this first Android device? Sadly, the HTC documentation doesn’t offer much detail. Those who claim to have seen it, however, say it will feature a trackball and a screen smaller than the one on the iPhone. They also believe it will offer access to an upcoming T-Mobile (DT) App Store similar to Apple’s (AAPL) App Store for iPhone/iPod Touch applications. The Dream will support push email, but only via Google’s Gmail service. Finally, it will use Google’s advertising platform to serve up ads based on user interests and location. Which, as far as Google is concerned, is the whole point here. “We can make more in mobile than desktop, eventually,” Google CEO Eric Schmidt said recently. “The reason is because the mobile device is more targeted. Think about it: You carry your phone with you everywhere. It knows all about you. We can use that to do a very, very targeted ad. Over time, Google will make more money from mobile advertising.”

Plus, said Schmidt, Google’s attention is best focused where the real money is, or will be soon: mobile advertising. “We can make more in mobile than desktop, eventually,” Schmidt said. “The reason is because the mobile device is more targeted. Think about it: You carry your phone with you everywhere. It knows all about you. We can use that to do a very, very targeted ad. Over time, Google will make more money from mobile advertising.”