Google's AdMob deal in jeopardy?

THE Federal Trade Commission may challenge the proposed merger between Google and mobile advertising giant AdMob on the basis that it violates antitrust laws.

Google agreed to buy AdMob last November for $750 million to provide display advertising technology for mobile Internet sites. The acquisition would compliment Google's efforts to join the mobile land grab and would sit alongside its increasingly popular Android operating system.

However, like all merger deals, it has to be approved by regulators and as Google already has a dominant position in the desktop search market, the AdMob deal has raised anti-competitive concerns.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the FTC has started putting together a litigation team in case it decides to block the deal, with letters apparently being sent to AdMob's competitors, asking them to testify about how the deal would negatively impact their businesses. The US Congress has also been briefed on the matter.

The mobile search advertising market is growing exponentially as mobile Internet use soars with expectations over the next five years that search queries on mobile phones will surpass searches on traditional personal computers.

Comments:

mobiThinking
Date: 16/04/2010 11:22:39

Doesn't any investigation into Google/AdMob presuppose that AdMob is the dominant mobile ad network and it's already cornered advertising on too much of the mobile Web?
So how do you balance this statistic: There are as many mobile sites on NTT DoCoMo's iMode portal than there are on AdMob's entire global network (and that's just a small fraction of the mobile sites in Japan).
For more on mobile in Japan see this guide: http://mobithinking.com/guide-mobile-Web-Japan
For more on mobile ad networks (yes there are lots more than just AdMob), see this guide: http://www.mobithinking.com/mobile-ad-network-guide

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