Devin Wenig, eBay’s president of global marketplaces, said in an interview that next year the company will stop running mobile ads inside of its applications.

“We aren’t happy with the user experience and we don’t need the money,” he said.

This year, eBay displayed ads inside of its iPhone app as an experiment, but found that they were distracting and cluttered up the smaller screens. The ads also didn’t deliver meaningful revenue.

“It’s not worth it,” Wenig added.

Fortunately for eBay, it has options.

The primary way it makes money is through selling products online. Meanwhile, other media properties that are mostly supported by advertising are left dealing with the fact that ads on mobile don’t perform as well as they do online.

“Some don’t have an alternative business model. In this case, it’s better to be lucky,” said Wenig, who, as the former CEO of Thomson Reuters Markets, knows all too well what it’s like to be in the other camp.

Despite eBay’s lack of enthusiasm for mobile advertising, it is a huge promoter of mobile commerce in general, as it serves consumers wherever they want to shop.

The San Jose-based company announced back in September that its mobile apps had been downloaded 100 million times since launching four years ago. That’s not a trivial number, given that it’s equal to the number of active users on eBay last year. Additionally, this year, eBay expects to transact more than $10 billion in mobile volume from its apps. In fact, the company just hit its biggest mobile shopping day ever on Dec. 2.

For advertisers, this should be a reminder that there is still a lot of work left to be done to make advertising run smoothly across a range of mobile devices. EBay’s huge mobile audience should be attractive to marketers over the long term, but given that it was only conducting experiments for now, its decision to hold off on in-app advertising won’t be counted as a huge loss.

Mobile image (not Prince image) copyright bloomua

Eager to avoid a meltdown, I launch the app and suffer through a random audio ad for Panera Bread that ends after 15 seconds or so. But the sandwich chain isn’t done with me. A banner ad for Panera soon appears, consuming three-quarters of my iPhone screen. I’m struck by the intrusion on my user experience and the lack of targeting — there isn’t even a Panera Bread at the airport. My daughter fidgets; “Where’s the song, Daddy?” she asks.

I have an equally pressing question: Is mobile display advertising spiraling down the same path as desktop display?

Allow me to back up for a minute. Mobile advertising is growing rapidly. Total spend in the U.S. during the first half of this year hit $1.2 billion — a staggering 95 percent jump from last year, according to an October report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Many forecasts predict that this growth won’t slow, and I believe them.

Viewing this through the prism of mobile display, it’s clear to see that critical needs are being served. Display can build brand exposure and heighten awareness. Plus, display is easy to buy.

However, this is where the trouble starts. Data is hard to come by, reporting is opaque, and tonnage trumps targeting. All advertisers have to do is sign up with one of the myriad mobile ad networks and, boom! Banners go everywhere, shares of ad networks soar and everybody wins. Party like it’s 1999.

Actually, this whole thing feels like deja vu all over again.

The parallels between desktop display back then and mobile display right now are downright eerie. According to historical data from the IAB, desktop display in 1999 was the dominant Internet ad format, grabbing 56 percent of a $4.6 billion market. Search was a whopping 0 percent.

Executives demanded that their marketing departments have an “Internet strategy.” So companies spent billions on banner ads, throwing up billboards every few feet on this new stretch of highway. Visiting any Web site in the late ’90s/early 2000s felt like teleporting into the advertising carousel of a European soccer stadium. It mattered not where these ads were placed, or who saw them. Conventional wisdom told us that as long as there were ads, customers would follow.

But this party started dying as advertisers noticed that search — not impressions — equals performance. It wasn’t just enough to be visible on the Internet; businesses wanted real customers. They wanted ROI, control, targeting and measurability, all of which gave rise to Google and other performance-based ad networks focused on search. Consumers benefited, too, from a more relevant desktop experience.

It’s not shocking what happened next. Display bottomed out, shrinking to 19 percent of the market in 2004, and generating less than half of what it did in 1999. At the same time, search was on fire, claiming 40 percent of the $9.6 billion Internet ad market. With the emergence of sophisticated targeting, programmatic buying and creative optimization, display ultimately regained its footing and growth with advertisers and publishers.

And here we are, about to enter 2013. Smartphone adoption reached a tipping point this year. Now, mobile is the Next Big Thing, yet it looks like history is bound and determined to repeat itself.

Executives are demanding that their marketing departments have a “mobile strategy.” Once again, companies insist on throwing billions into display/banner ads on mobile, even though the return is questionable at best. When consumers do click on mobile display ads, they’re usually accidental. At Marchex, we took a recent data dive into mobile display experiences and found that more than 90 percent of actions were accidental — or worse, actions from trying to close an ad. I mean, when was the last time you deliberately clicked on a mobile display ad?

We have to learn from the past. Because, in advertising, there’s this huge iceberg called performance. And that iceberg is even bigger in mobile. You’re dealing with more fragmentation at the publisher level (such as thousands of developer apps), significantly different form factor (smaller screens), and much higher rates of accidental clicks and incidence of spam (robo-dialers).

Increasingly, businesses will want to know, “Does mobile work?”

The future of mobile advertising depends on what that answer is.

Pete Christothoulou is President of Marchex, a performance-based mobile advertising company.

andersphoto / Shutterstock.com

The Finnish phone giant is working with Israel’s Inneractive to create Nokia Ad Exchange (NAX), which officials say will enable access to 120 different ad networks across the globe, with the opportunity to gain revenue in more than 200 countries.

“It really is a single point for developers to monetize any app that they have or (to) promote other apps,” Nokia developer relations executive Richard Kerris said in an interview.

The other pitch Nokia is making is offering a greater-than-typical cut to developers, promising 75 percent to the app maker, with Nokia and Inneractive getting the remaining 25 percent.

In addition, Nokia is also offering developers a bunch of added benefits to those who take part in a new premier program. For $99, developers get membership in Microsoft’s Windows developer program, technical support and as much as $1,200 worth of real-time notifications, enough for 12 million API calls.

More specifically: Are people clicking on Facebook’s phone ads because they want to? Or because they meant to click on something else?

This isn’t the first time that the mobile ad business has grappled with the “fat finger” question — the notion that the smaller a screen gets, the more likely accidental clicks become. And there’s probably some truth to it.

For instance: GoldSpot, a mobile ad network, guesses that nearly four in 10 clicks on the conventional banner ads it serves on smartphones may be accidental.

But it thinks that number drops down to 13 percent for the “rich media” ads it serves — ads that dance, sing, do headstands, etc. — because it’s much more obvious that its ads are ads. Not coincidentally, GoldSpot really pushes its rich media ads.

Just as interesting: GoldSpot figures that accidental clicks are much more likely to happen in the morning than during the middle of the day. And it thinks the likelihood of a mistake picks up again in the evening.

Two guesses here:

• You’re more likely to make a mistake on your phone when you’re in motion, distracted, headed to/or from work/school, etc.
• You’re probably using your phone less during daytime hours, anyway. Because you’re at work/school, etc.

Meanwhile, as we’re assessing the girth of your fingers, keep in mind that engagement rates for all sorts of digital advertising fall over time.

Because at first we’re likely to click on this stuff because we haven’t seen it before — like the original banner ads in the mid-’90s — and then we get used to it.

And then it won’t matter how big these things are, and how much they shimmy. Unless there’s something really compelling there, you’re going to learn to ignore it.

But when it comes to mobile, even Facebook wasn’t moving fast enough. That was the message on Friday from Facebook Mobile VP Vaughan Smith.

And yet the opportunity there is huge, Smith said. Falling smartphone prices mean that an ever-increasing number of people around the globe are getting their hands on a device. Moreover, he said, more customers are shifting to plans that allow mobile data access.

“Facebook is one of the key reasons users are doing this,” Smith said, speaking at the Global Mobile Internet Conference in San Jose. “They are not saying they want to get on the Internet in emerging markets. They are saying ‘I want to get on Facebook.’”

Historically, Smith said, the company’s goal was to take what it was doing on the Web and copy it as much as possible onto phones.

“We’ve completely changed the way we do product development,” Smith said, saying that Facebook is now focused on mobile-first efforts.

Most of its mobile code is now coming from the key product teams, rather than from a team trying to “mobilize” existing products.

“That’s a huge change for us,” he said. “We’ve pivoted our thinking.”

The other key change is putting more energy behind native applications, rather than HTML5 and the mobile Web, Smith said, reiterating a point made recently by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

On the business side, the company is working hard to start selling mobile advertising. There, the company had essentially no revenue in the first quarter of the year, but has moved to put ads into the news feed and other places. Click-through rates, he said, are ten times what they are on the desktop, he said.

“Clearly, it is early days with these types of products,” Smith said.

Facebook is also helping cellular carriers that partner closely, noting that Facebook users switch carriers 18 percent less than a typical customer.

“We bring a partner mind-set into this,” he said. “Together, we believe we can make the world more open and connected.”

Some of the ingredients to success include ads that play on the unique properties of mobile gadgets, including location, or ads disguised as a game, coupon or information that consumers want, say ad executives and industry observers.

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Pro Tip 1: If you want to see what the fuss is about, head over to qz.com, not quartz.com.* The latter will only help you if you’re interested in tubing and rod.

Pro Tip 2: Even though Quartz makes a big deal of targeting tablet and smartphone users, don’t bother looking for it at Apple’s App Store or Google’s Android Market. Instead of producing apps for the new publication, Quartz expects you to find its stuff the old-fashioned way — on the Web, via a WordPress-produced site.

Paradoxically, that puts Quartz on the leading edge of digital publishing, or at least in the middle of digital publishing chatter. There’s a lot of talk about “Web apps” instead of “native apps” and “responsive design” right now, and Quartz highlights both concepts.

In English: Instead of asking readers to download an app to get its stuff on tablets or phones, Quartz will work on the mobile Web browsers those machines already have. And it will publish a single Web site, which will configure itself depending on the kind of device and screen size each reader uses.

Duh. Right?

Except that just two years ago, the entire publishing world was consumed with the iPad, and tablets in general, and the notion that device-specific apps would allow them to break free of the tyranny of the free Web’s economics. Instead of giving away their stuff online, publishers argued/hoped, they could sell discrete bundles of programming and content via Apple, and hopefully Google and other platforms.

But, both publicly  and privately, many publishers now concede that they’ve been underwhelmed with apps. The road for brand-new titles launched as apps has been even rockier. So the Quartz staff say they decided early on that they would give away their content, and they would do it on the Web.

“It seems very clear that the Web is far more suited for sharing of news and articles, and we want everybody to access our stuff,” says senior editor Zachary Seward.** “It sounds sort of silly to say this, but anyone can navigate directly to any of our stories. You can’t do that in the app store world.”

Seward showed me a preview of the approach over the weekend, but I was looking at it via MacBook, not iPad, so I can’t vouch for the way the site will display on mobile screens. I can note that on a laptop screen the site has a very simple approach that makes it look quite a bit like other publishers’ mobile sites. No flashy graphics or extra “rails” of headlines and other “entry points.”

That’s intentional, Seward says, because Quartz wants to look more or less the same no matter what screen you’re using. And mobile sites have to be utilitarian.

There’s some precedent for reaching high-end business news readers on mobile devices without a bona fide app. Last year, after a dispute with Apple over subscription terms, Pearson’s Financial Times launched its own Web app, which it says has performed quite well.

But the FT already had an established brand, and customers. Quartz will now have to find its own without the help that someone like Apple could have provided via its App Store.

At least as important: By bailing on native apps and the income they can provide, Quartz will have to fight for ad dollars in a brutal climate. Mobile ads may be the future, but right now they’re dirt cheap. People who buy and sell display ads tell me that mobile eyeballs frequently sell at an 80 percent discount to Web prices, which are already under pressure.

Team Quartz says they can solve that problem with a plan that involves selling “sponsorships” instead of conventional Web advertising, along with other tactics, like events. That one we won’t be able to assess for some time.

*And you may have to be patient. The Quartz staff thought the site would be live early this morning, but is apparently still working out some last-minute kinks.

**Both Seward and editor-in-chief Kevin Delaney used to work at The Wall Street Journal, which, like this Web site, is owned by News Corp.

The San Francisco company’s shares could be priced as soon as tomorrow night, and start trading Thursday morning. Trulia is offering six million shares at $14 to $16 apiece, which, at the midpoint of that range, would raise $65.8 million in net proceeds to the company. That would also value Trulia at $461 million.

Trulia trails behind sector leader Zillow, which held a very successful IPO last year. Zillow sold shares at $20, and now trades near $43 a share, valuing the company at $1.24 billion, or nearly three times Trulia’s proposed value. Trulia is expected to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol TRLA.

A third company in the space, Realtor.com, trades publicly under the corporate name of Move, Inc.

Morningstar analyst James Krapfel wrote in a note to investors that he believes Zillow is the better bet over the long term, although, in his opinion, both companies are poised to grow as more consumers and agents shift the house-hunting process online.

“We believe Trulia has a growing network effect that could keep upstart online competitors at bay, but believe Zillow’s larger network effect will allow Zillow to maintain its position as the primary home search marketplace,” Krapfel wrote in the note.

Last week, Zillow sued Trulia, alleging that its Trulia Estimates feature infringes on Zillow’s patent related to estimating the value for homes and properties. Zillow is seeking a permanent injunction against Trulia, damages and attorneys’ fees.

A Trulia spokesperson did not reply to emails seeking comment, which is standard practice during the IPO process.

Trulia leveraged a new provision in the JOBS Act that allowed it to file for a public offering confidentially. It did not disclose any financials until 21 days before its road show, which perhaps has allowed it to fly under the radar, compared to other recent tech IPOs.

In the company’s online road show, Trulia highlighted its mobile strategy, saying that, unlike other recent companies that went public and have struggled, it is benefiting from the smartphone trend.

Trulia co-founder and CEO Pete Flint said mobile works for real estate because customers are often out spending the afternoon looking at open houses. Likewise, real estate agents are mobile professionals, conducting their business wherever they happen to be. Because of that, ads monetize better on mobile than they do on the Web, he said. For example, the company’s average revenue per agent is $167 a month on mobile versus $134 a month on the Web.

In 2011, the company nearly doubled its losses to $6.2 million from $3.8 million a year earlier, at the same time doubling revenue to $38.5 million.

Proceeds from the offering are expected to be used for working capital and general corporate purposes. Current shareholders, including Flint and other executives and directors, expect to sell one million shares in the offering.

In an interview, Rosenblum said that today was his first day at Drawbridge after working at Google for four and a half years.

In his new role as Drawbridge’s VP of Product, Rosenblum will be responsible for overseeing the company’s technology, which enables marketers to target users as they move from their computers to tablets and to mobile phones.

“Mobile is gaining share of minutes, so at some point it has to gain share of dollars,” Rosenblum said.

The company is trying to solve a problem, he said, that he was familiar with at Google. Google Offers sells discounts to consumers on everyday items, such as spa services or meals at restaurants, similar to Groupon. However, Google’s offering is slightly different because it is designed to help Google close the loop, so that it can show how online behavior — including Web searches — is dictating offline purchasing behavior. A key component of that is Google’s payment platform, called Google Wallet, which has struggled to gain consumer adoption.

While several members of the Google Wallet team have left, Google Offers has been more stable, even considering Rosenblum’s exit.

Rosenblum says his departure is not a reflection of the division’s success. “We’ve always positioned Google Offers as not competing directly with Groupon. We’ve built it as a closed loop ad platform,” he said. “I think we were wise to take a different tack and spend our engineering resources on that tack. Most small advertisers want to pay on CPA (cost per acquisition) basis, and I’m pretty proud that it’s as far along as it is.”

In May, Rosenblum announced that Google had started to integrate Groupon-like offers into Google Maps and that it was trying out other advertising models for coupons and rewards programs.

Now at Drawbridge, he said, he can help even small companies that don’t have Google-size resources increase revenue from mobile advertising by increasing their targeting abilities. The San Mateo, Calif.-based company is about two years old and has 21 employees. In May, Drawbridge’s founder and former Admob engineer Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan raised $6.5 million from Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer.

Here’s the full release:

Eric Rosenblum, Former Google Director of Product, Joins Cross-Screen Advertising Startup Drawbridge

Mobile payments expert to lead product innovation for Drawbridge’s cross-screen advertising platform

SAN MATEO, Calif. – September 10, 2012 – Drawbridge, the leader in cross-screen mobile advertising, today announces its new VP of Product: Eric Rosenblum, former Google Offers Director of Product. Rosenblum brings over 16 years of experience in product innovation, mobile payments and entrepreneurial ventures and will be responsible for driving forward product development plans for Drawbridge’s cross-screen mobile ad platform.

Rosenblum spent over four years at Google as Director of Strategy and Operations and Director of Product. Prior to joining Google, Rosenblum was founder and CEO of Smartpay, a leading mobile payment company in China. He also served as GM of Greater China and Global Strategy GM for RealNetworks. Rosenblum started his career with the Boston Consulting Group in Hong Kong and Shanghai after receiving an MBA from MIT Sloan.

“Drawbridge’s opportunity is immense,” says Rosenblum. “10% of media time is now consumed on mobile, but mobile only attracts 1% of the ad spend. The team at Drawbridge has made tremendous progress developing the tools to close this gap and building the technology foundations to finally make targeting and attribution work across all mobile screens and devices. I am beyond excited to be joining this outstanding team for the challenge.”

Drawbridge has developed technology that is able to leverage targeting data across screens and across devices. Through Drawbridge’s sophisticated probabilistic and statistical inference models, brands get a unified view of their customers regardless of channel, screen, or device. Since launching in May, Drawbridge has onboarded major advertisers focused on driving cross-screen performance in the retail, travel, and entertainment verticals. Drawbridge has made its innovative platform publicly available to advertisers and publisher partners, who can sign up at www.drawbrid.ge.

Kamakshi Sivaramakrishnan, Drawbridge founder and former AdMob and Google scientist, leads the company with funding from premier venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Sequoia Capital.

To learn more about Drawbridge or sign up for their service, visit: www.drawbrid.ge

About Drawbridge
Drawbridge developed the world’s first cross-screen ad technology, enabling marketers to reach their target audience across any screen and any device – smartphone, tablet or personal computer. Unlike web cookies or fingerprint-based solutions, Drawbridge leverages anonymous, non-personally identifiable information to serve ads to hundreds of millions of unique users around the world – regardless of what kind of device they happen to be using. Drawbridge is located in Silicon Valley and is backed by Sequoia Capital and Kleiner, Perkins Caulfield and Byers.

From the retail shelves to the courtroom, the two companies have emerged as the clear rivals when it comes to smartphones.

And things are no different when it comes to the mobile Web. Chitika, which tracks Web share use on its ad network, says Samsung’s Galaxy S III is quickly becoming a force, though Apple remains the clear leader.

For every one ad impression that comes from a Samsung device, there are four from Apple devices.

“Both the sales and Web presence numbers have been impressive early on for the Galaxy S III, but does it have the staying power to compete with the iPhone 5 due for release this September?” Chitika said in a report on Wednesday. “Particularly in the context of the series of patent lawsuits between the manufacturers, this head-to-head matchup will be one of the most intriguing contests in the smartphone market this year.”

As for the Galaxy S III, it now accounts for more than 11 percent of all Web surfing coming from Samsung smartphones.

“The device has quickly surpassed the Galaxy Nexus in activity, and is hot on the tails of other Galaxy S models,” Chitika said.

Apple and Samsung are also increasingly each other’s main competition, particularly here in the U.S. NPD noted in a report on Tuesday that Apple and Samsung combined saw their unit sales up 43 percent in the second quarter, while all other brands fell a combined 16 percent from a year earlier. Apple had 31 percent of U.S. retail sales, while Samsung accounted for 24 percent, NPD said.

Samsung plans to announce Tuesday that it’s adding a mobile phone advertising exchange platform to its internal device ad efforts, which are dubbed AdHub.

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MyYearbook is going in a different direction. The “social discovery” site, which helps users meet each other but isn’t explicitly about dating, has actually been pretty smart about zigging when others are zagging. Its latest business model experiment is a mobile credits program where users can pay to promote themselves to other users.

MyYearbook is giving all its users a popularity score based on their number of profile views, friend requests and other activity. Users will be able to directly manipulate that score by buying mobile credits to “spotlight” their own profiles within the app.

Usually, credits sold within a social network are used to buy virtual goods, but myYearbook is selling credits to users so they can basically buy their own ad units, which are targeted by age, gender and location.

Obviously, gaming user popularity wouldn’t work for a social app that’s trying to directly reflect real-world relationships, but it makes sense in the context of myYearbook. It’s similar, argued Quepasa COO Geoff Cook, to how Zillow charges realtors to promote themselves to other users.

(Cook was formerly CEO of myYearbook, before it merged with Latino social network Quepasa last year.)

The pressure is on to make money from mobile, Cook said, because myYearbook users are migrating there in droves. Fifty-four percent of both daily and monthly active users log in from myYearbook’s iOS and Android apps, and 17 percent of users are mobile-only.

Versus Web users, mobile users visit myYearbook more often, for shorter periods of time.

Up till now, myYearbook had been showing about one ad per mobile page view, but only making a “single digit” percent of its revenues from mobile. Cook said mobile ads bring in hundreds of thousands of dollars per month — but that’s not enough, considering mobile usage.

The myYearbook’s mobile credits system will be available on both iOS and Android, and it will tie to existing credits and promotion systems on the Web. In line with other in-app payments efforts, Cook said he expects more success on iOS.

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.

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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.