It is very interesting to see a small company being swallowed by a giant. When a market leader like Google does it, it is a big news. While having a morning coffee and keeping up with the world, I just found out that google got AdMob.
As an iPhone app developer, AdMob has always been one of my option for making money. It follows my logic of Google, “make it free to the end users, get paid by people who want to take advantage.” It makes perfect sense, but I don’t think google made the right decisions. I guess buying YouTube has not taught them any lesson.
When I see a column of google ads on my 24 inch monitor, I could careless. When I see an ads pop-up on the bottom of youtube, I get annoyed. When I see an ad pop-up from tiny iPhone screen, I get pissed off. I would rather buy the apps than have random ads pop-up.
CNN recently released an app for iphone. They are charging $2 for the application and have pop-up ads in their app. I know that $2 won’t even cover the 1% of development fee they spent, but also having ads on top of that is just ridiculous. If you guys provide quality apps, people don’t mind paying monthly subscription.
We smartphone users pay extra for privileged extra features, most of us don’t mind paying couple extra. I know AdMob provides other services than ads, but looking from ads point of view, this is what I think.
