Mobile advertising: ripe for consolidation

The mobile advertising industry seems to have quietened slightly since the Google-AdMob acquisition was cleared, and the Apple-Quattro purchase settled down into the iAds announcement. Around that time, people (well, VCs) were hopeful that this was the beginning of a wave of acquisition in a fairly crowded marketplace. The trouble is, there aren't that many more potential acquirers out there.

There is, however, plenty of room for consolidation. I say this as someone who has been signing the same visitors' books at the same advertisers and agencies as every other mobile advertising network... At some point, somebody is going to realize that all the networks are busy selling and re-selling one anothers' inventory, and that the fight right now is for who gets to be top of the tree, making the most CPM/CPC, as opposed to being somewhere near the bottom, and scraping the smallest cut before it gets to the publishers.

In short: the InMobis, Jumptaps, Millennials, Madvertises, Smaatos, Mojivas and Greystripes of this world are ripe for consolidation for scale. Plug the newly-acquired publishers into an existing network, and consolidate by scrapping the lesser technology/product platform and the people who created it, slicing through an executive team, and laying off the worst-performing ad sales people. It wouldn't entirely surprise me if players who already have mobile ad networks (such as Navteq/Nokia or Microsoft, or even Google) start to make acquisitions like this to build scale, or to enter territories where they don't presently feel strong enough. In the meantime, the slightly confused and confusing market landscape of dozens of overlapping mobile advertising networks is a labyrinth that some may need help in navigating. Watch this space...

This post was originally published on www.insidermobile.com on July 27th 2010