Merger Monday is back in the tech space. Just hours after Electronic Arts announced it was buying social gaming outfit Playfish for up to $400 million, Google has announced that it’s buying mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million in stock.

In a statement, Google’s Susan Wojcicki, Vice President of Product Management, says, “Mobile advertising has enormous potential as a marketing medium and while this industry is still in the early stages of development, AdMob has already made exceptional progress in a very short time. AdMob is the quintessential Silicon Valley startup — generating impressive year on year revenue growth — and we’re excited to welcome this talented team to Google.”

Since its inception, AdMob has served more than 125 billion mobile ads (according to the counter on its homepage) across a variety of platforms including iPhone and Android. Clearly, this is a space that’s red hot right now, and while Google already has launched a number of products into it, this deal greatly accelerates the effort.

Google attempts to illustrate the synergies on a website it has setup specifically about the deal, as well as in the image below:

While one of the biggest deals we’ve seen come out of the Web space in some time, it’s not completely unexpected. When Google reported earnings last month, we noted that the company now has $22 billion in cash, and CEO Eric Schmidt said his company feels “confident about investing heavily in our future.” That’s certainly the case here, as Google has just made a very big bet on mobile ads.

Reviews: Android, Google, iPhone

Tags: admob, advertising, Google, Mobile 2.0



Go to Full Article