Virtually parallel announcements from Google and Yahoo! extend the reach of search engine advertisers to high-end smartphones. According to the New York Times (October 5, 2009), and the Google Blog, the King of Search Engines has just launched an application that will benefit Google advertisers. The new AdSense Mobile phone feature, according to the Times, lets “mobile publishers run special Google text ads on their sites when the site is visited by a smartphone. But instead of the basic text ads shown on regular cell phone Web sites, the ads come in different sizes, with more sophisticated design, and can include small images.” The result will be “a better-looking text ad, advertisers can send ads only to high-end phones, and publishers (and Google) potentially get more money for ads, since high-end users can be more valuable.”

Google commits to smartphone advertising

According to Google, “High-end mobile phones, like iPhone, Android-powered devices and the Palm Pre, continue to grow — Gartner estimates that global sales of smartphones will soar by 27% in 2009, to 177 million units. Naturally, as a result more and more people are browsing the Web on the go.”

The Times, quoting a company spokesman, revealed Google’s depth of commitment to smartphones: “The company’s advertising strategy ‘bet very big on these more sophisticated handsets,’ said Vic Gundotra, vice president for engineering at Google.”

While Google may be wagering heavily on the applications, investors apparently are less sanguine. The paper quotes Jeffrey Lindsay, an analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company, who published a report last week, as indicating “although mobile usage was growing, revenue potential was limited. Mr. Lindsay estimated that even in 2013, mobile search in the United States would bring in less than 2 percent of projected Google revenues for that year, around $650 million.”
Yahoo! sponsored search ads now appear on iPhones and Androids
According to Yahoo!, for many consumers, surfing the Web does not depend upon the PC.  For that reason, the company has “tweaked” its Yahoo! sponsored search system to serve customer ads to iPhone (all models, including iTouch) and Android mobile phones. Significantly, Yahoo! Advertisers do not have to take any action to expand the reach of their ads, as Yahoo! has accomplished that for them.

With this enhancement, standard Sponsored Search ads (40-character header, 70-character description, the host URL) now appear on these mobile devices, giving customer ads “wider appeal and more relevancy to people on the go”  (More on Yahoo!’s recent efforts to provide better experiences to mobile users and advertisers can be found on ABC News TechBytes (Flickr’s new mobile app), and an audio interview with the company’s senior director of mobile applications, Sandeep Gupta, on The Boot Camp Report.

MVP Marketing + Design through its MVP Social Networking division offers marketing strategies and builds Web applications for smartphones and social media. Learn more.

Sources:

http://www.ysmblog.com/blog/2009/09/29/mobile-reach-for-your-ads

http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/search/label/google%20mobile%20ads

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/media/05adco.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print