[The Msearchgroove exclusive mobile advertising podcast series – in close cooperation with VisionMobile – continues with AdMob CEO & Founder Omar Hamoui. Special thanks to Paul Nash, creative director at fifty50, for designing the cheat sheet for mobile publishers based on input from AdMob's best & brightest. Paul, together with his colleague Matt Harper, is also driving our new design, and a long list of innovations in navigation and site usability that really rock!]

AdMob has gained some serious traction since it broke on the scene just two years ago, building up the scale and the clout to take on major league players including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo. In fact, AdMob effectively enables the world’s largest mobile advertising marketplace, having just reached its mega-milestone of delivering over 5 billion ads in the last 20 months – one billion of those in the last month. (We covered it here and calculated AdMob generally serves more than 370 ads per second.) Since then the company has quietly and cleverly launched a new advertising unit focused on the iPhone. In plain text, AdMob ad servers will recognize iPhone users and serve up iPhone-specific advertisements, paving the way for the company’s network of 2,000+ publishers to monetize their iPhone traffic and develop iPhone-specific content.

And speaking of reach, AdMob has sewn up a slew of deals – most notably a tie-up with CBS Mobile, which made AdMob one of its “gang of four” advertising-enabling companies to provide clients ad options ranging from text and banner ads to video interstitials. More recently, AdMob struck a deal with Contec Innovations to deliver ads via Contec’s BUZmob mobile publishing service. Of course, enabling mobile advertisers to place more ads with more publishers creates inventory for all and solves the bottleneck of having more ads to serve than sites to show them on…

I caught up with Omar Hamoui, AdMob CEO & Founder, to talk about the stellar stats, the competitive landscape and pose the all-important question: When are you going to be acquired and by whom?! The answer: AdMob will stay an independent company for now, but would consider the option more seriously if and when it runs out of steam. (Not likely to happen any time soon since Omar told me off-line that he predicts “on a revenue basis [by next year] we’ll make 6x what we did this year. If I annualize our revenue last year, the year was probably 10x of what we did last year.”

Listen to the podcast here. [23:51]

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And a special feature for novice mobile publishers: AdMob agreed to share the secrets of site optimization with our readers. It’s free and fact-packed – and you can download it here.

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This entry was posted on Friday, August 31st, 2007 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Mobile Advertising, Mobile Search. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.