Google confirmed on its official blog that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has approved Google’s acquisition of mobile advertising platform AdMob with the Commission vote on closing the investigation standing at a unanimous 5-0.
Interestingly, while Google report it as a straight approval, the actual wording from the FTC is not quite so straightforward.
In the release the Commission says “although the combination of the two leading mobile advertising networks raised serious antitrust issues, the agency’s concerns ultimately were overshadowed by recent developments in the market, most notably a move by Apple Computer Inc. – the maker of the iPhone – to launch its own, competing mobile ad network.” It then adds “A number of firms appear to be developing or acquiring smartphone platforms to better compete against Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android, and these firms would have a strong incentive to facilitate competition among mobile advertising networks.” Which to us sounds very much like we don’t like the idea that Google are buying AdMob but what the hell they’re going to have to compete against Apple and we’re betting on Apple.
However, regardless of what we think, the news settles several months of needless “will they”, “won’t they” speculation, and allows Google to get on with the work of integrating AdMob into it’s various analytics and ad serving systems. As Susan Wojcicki, Vice President of Product Management says in the blog post “We’re very excited about the possibilities in this field. As an immediate matter, we’re now moving to close this acquisition in coming weeks. We’ll then start work right away on bringing AdMob’s and Google’s teams and products together. This industry is moving fast, and we’re excited to be part of the race”
Expected benefits for advertisers of the new AdMob Google pairing are; sophisticated localisation of advertising, a wider range of advertising choices, audio, video, text graphics etc and a wider reach for mobile advertisers than they previously could expect from the AdMob service. So it’s win win.
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