AdMob serves one billion ads in six months

AdMob Inc., the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace, announced that it has served one billion mobile web advertisements in the past six months. Founded in early 2006, AdMob has enriched the mobile landscape by enabling advertisers to reach their customers on the mobile web and by allowing publishers to monetize traffic on their mobile sites. Backed by real-time metrics and reporting, advertisers can reach out to users across a set of mobile content channels including news, entertainment, mobile communities and mobile portals.

“The encouraging data point for the mobile web is not just the number of ads being served, but the pace at which things are growing,” explained Omar Hamoui, Founder and CEO of AdMob. “In our first six months, we only served about thirty million ads, and over the next six months we served one-billion more.”

In early analysis of their significant mobile web page traffic, the company spotted some interesting and sometimes surprising data.

“The mobile advertising industry really needs more transparency,” continued Hamoui, “as well as accurate and actionable data. For the first time, we really feel that we have sufficient scale to develop some insight on the usage of the mobile web and we’re determined to invest more time sharing this knowledge to help spur the growth of the industry as a whole.”

Geographic breakdown
Although the company expected U.S. users to make up only a small portion of the mobile web, in actuality the U.S. was the network’s largest contributor of mobile web traffic. Surprisingly, South Africa was the second largest source of mobile web users across AdMob’s publisher base.

Across the AdMob network the top five countries in terms of traffic are:
US 20% (ninety million pageviews/month)
South Africa 15% (sixty-six million pageviews/month)
India 13% (fifty-seven million pageviews/month)
UK 12% (fifty three million pageviews/month)
Romania 5% (twenty-two million pageviews/month)

Content breakdown
The publishers in AdMob’s network have been categorized into five primary content channels. Of the five channels, “Communities” and “Downloads” far outweigh “Portals,” “News and Information,” and “Entertainment” in terms of traffic.

The traffic breakdown by channel is:
Communities 45%
Downloads 44%
Portals 8%
Entertainment 2%
News and Information 1%

Manufacturer breakdown
The company also found an interesting breakdown in the relative proportion of devices that access the mobile web. Nokia led the pack with a commanding 41% share of devices accessing mobile sites on the AdMob network.

The top five manufacturers across the AdMob network are:
Nokia 41%
Motorola 14%
Sony-Ericsson 13%
Samsung 12%
LG 3%

With a slew of new product announcements and features in the pipeline, AdMob believes that its first billion ads are just the beginning for mobile advertising. In a recent report, research firm eMarketer stated that marketing through mobile phones is poised to become an important medium for advertisers, with predictions that brands will be spending nearly $5 billion on mobile advertising in 2011, up from $421 million in 2006.