Mobile browser company Opera today announced that it has acquired the mobile ad networks Mobile Theory and 4th Screen Advertising. The move is not just another sign of the ongoing consolidation in that space, but also of the need to bulk up to better compete with the likes of Google with more full-service solutions.

Opera will be paying $18 million for Mobile Theory and $8 million for 4th Screen, with potential earn-outs bringing in an additional $32 million and $6.5 million respectively in 2013 and 2014

The move comes at the same time that San Mateo/Oslo, Norway-based Opera announced its latest quarterly earnings, in which revenues were up by 31 percent to 253.1 million Norwegian Kronor ($44 million), on the back of strong growth in its desktop browser, consumer/advertising, and OEM divisions — offsetting a small decline in the company’s first-ever customer base, mobile operators.

It also arrives as several other big moves take hold in the mobile ad space, with Google changing how companies bid for ad space on its AdMob network — lowering the prices in the process, which will probably mean even more volume going through that network — and Apple reportedly sweetening the terms for iAds yet again, bringing down minimum spend to $100,000 (that is, a tenth of what it reportedly required when it first launched iAds in 2010); and giving publishers 70 percent of the proceeds instead of 60 percent as it did before.

On top of that, all parties are very likely to get a new, formidable competitor in Facebook, when it finally unveils its first mobile marketing products — reportedly at the end of this month.

Mobile Theory and 4th Screen, which focus on rich-media advertising solutions, will help expand Opera’s existing mobile advertising business. Opera already offers a range of mobile ad services for a range of smartphone and feature phone mobile platforms, such as Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, BlackBerry, Symbian from Nokia and Java — a business it moved into in earnest when it bought supply-side publisher AdMarvel two years ago. Opera says that business generated $200 million in revenue for publisher partners last year. That’s still a fair bit from Google, which generated mobile ad spend of $750 million last year in the U.S. alone.

Opera claims that it is the world’s most popular mobile browser, with some 160 million monthly active users and 100 billion page views, so it’s no surprise that it is making moves like this to better monetize that base.

In addition to getting mobile users onto the web, Opera also launched its own app store last year. It sells mobile ads that appear both in the web browsing and apps part of its business.

The idea of buying two demand-side networks instead of one seems to be partly also because Mobile Theory has most of its business in the U.S., with headquarters in San Francisco, while 4th Screen is mainly focused in Europe, with its base in London.

Mobile Theory counts companies like Microsoft, Chevrolet and Coca-Cola among its clients, and serves up to 2 billion impressions per month across 300 mobile sites and apps, covering 60 million mobile users. Opera did not reveal 4th Screen’s corresponding numbers but it works with several big-name publishers such as The Guardian, Shazam, MTV and IMDb.

Tablet use has skyrocketed over the past year, so it makes sense that advertisers are flocking to these devices and platforms to reach consumers. Google tells us that in November 2011, AdMob saw 8 billion ad requests coming from tablets, an increase from 1 billion in December of 2010, and a 700 percent increase in the past year.

To put that number in perspective, AdMob sees nearly 3 billion ad requests a day globally. In May, Google introduced new formats for tablet ads, allowing advertisers and publishers to serve full-screen interstitial ads built with HTML5 on smartphones and tablets.

A few weeks ago, Google launched a number of new tablet ad formats, including ways to interact with a specific product, feature a collection of products or promote foot traffic to a specific store location.

In its mobile roundup post for 2011, Google revealed that AdMob saw a 440% growth in traffic from tablets in November 2011 compared to December 2010.

When Google bought mobile ad network AdMob for $750 million in 2009, the company was clearly trying to capitalize on the growing mobile advertising market. Mobile advertising, both on apps and the mobile web, is a natural extension of Google’s display and search ad business. Of course, as the integration has taken place over the last year, certain AdMob features have been axed because  they didn’t fit with the overall strategy or  for redundancy. For example, Google ended AdMob’s cross-promotion download exchange a few months ago. And now Google is announcing that it will soon end AdMob’s mobile web serving capabilities.

As Google aptly titled its blog post announcing the change; AdMob is for mobile app developers. AdSense is for mobile web publishers. Even after over a year of integration, Google is still sorting out the overlap and has determined that mobile web publishers should head to AdSense to monetize their sites, and mobile app publishers should use AdMob.

And for mobile apps advertising, all AdSense for Mobile Applications beta participants have been switched to AdMob, which Google says is now the primary ad solution for mobile app developers.

Google says that AdMob support for older WAP mobile web sites will stop on September 30. For sites and ads that can be viewed on more advanced mobile devices like smartphones, the AdMob product will be around for a little longer but will also be phased out eventually.

It makes sense that there would be some crossover between AdMob and AdSense’s mobile offerings, and that certain programs and features in both platforms will be cut and further integrations will be made. For example, Google announced last fall that iPhone and Android application developers in the AdMob network will be able to show Google AdSense ads when an AdMob ad is not available.

And despite some earlier reports that the AdMob integration hasn’t been going so well, the mobile ad network’s metrics are still growing like gangbusters. It’s unclear how much hardship this move will cause developers (Google makes it sounds like a natural progression and integration), but it definitely doesn’t make sense for there to be competing ad serving technologies within the same organization.

Apparently, Google sent all developers who are participants in the exchange an email informing them that the AdMob Download Exchange is being ‘sunset’ and ‘will no longer operate after June 8, 2011.’ From Google’s email: This will allow us to focus our efforts on further developing our suite of publisher tools.

Google is encouraging developers to use the network’s House Ads, which allows you to cross-promote your own products within your own apps. The search giant is also encouraging developers to use Google AdSense ads to improve “fill-rates and increase your revenue potential.”

The problem with House Ads is that they don’t allow you to promote on other developers apps and reach new audiences, which was the benefit of the Exchange. And developers got the inventory for free. It’s unclear if Google will add this functionality into House ads, but sunsetting the feature all together may not make developers too happy with AdMob.

Update: Google has confirmed to us that the AdMob Download Exchange has been shut down.

Overall, AdMob traffic (Ad Requests) have grown more than 3.5 times in the last year. In April, AdMob saw over 2.7 billion ad requests a day globally, up from over 2 billion announced in January. There are over 80,000 mobile websites and apps in the AdMob network, up from over 50,000 in January. And 11 countries in the AdMob network generated more than a billion monthly ad requests in April 2011, up from just three countries a year ago.

AdMob tells us that they’ve seen traffic for tablet ads growing like crazy; in terms of requests the ratio of mobile to tablet ad requests are 5 to 1. Today, Google is announcing new formats for tablet ads, allowing advertisers and publishers to serve full-screen interstitial ads built with HTML5 on smartphones and tablets. These advertisements can include branded video, image gallery, and interactive formats.

The network is also launching new targeting for cross-promotion mobile ads for publishers, enabling developers to run promotions of their apps in specific geographies.

Another addition Google is announcing today is that ad serving platform DoubleClick for Publishers
DoubleClick for Publishers is now integrated with AdMob. So third party ad serving from DoubleClick is now available on the AdMob network, with support for rich media formats.

Meet Julian Zehetmayer, who in 2010 as a 17-year old high school drop out quietly launched MobFox, a mobile advertising network, much like Admob, but with a simple and clear USP: Higher CPCs/CPMs for developers working with MobFox as their mobile advertising solution of choice. The startup, which is currently self funded and according to the founder “only interested if the deal is interesting enough”, is already being used in around 1,500 applications worldwide, with several renowned apps such as Friendly for Facebook or IM+ making money through MobFox’s ad engine.

In comparison, when Google bought Admob they served ads to around 15,000 apps and had raised up to $15.7 million in Series C funding and had a significantly larger sales and development force. These are quite interesting stats given the fact that MobFox is currently a one-person company living off its own revenues, which are reportedly to be somewhere around €10,000 daily.

The startup has not only attracted publishers through a higher CPC/CPM promise (which obviously every ad offering does) but with some intuitive and smart features, such as eCPMonitor, which allows developers to adjust a minimum CPC for their ads. If they don’t perform well enough, the developer may chose from a variety of backup services such as Admob, which enables one to fill the rest of the inventory.

Another function lets developers serve a particular set of ads that they can upload and manage through the system, making it effectively a full mobile ad server as well. There are SDKs also available for all major mobile operating systems (except for Symbian) and among the advertisers using the platform are mobile giants such as Buongiorno or YOC.

Google director of engineering Mark Schaaf (who is a former AdMob Engineering Director and the network’s third employee) says that the addition of Windows Phone 7 SDK aligns with Google’s openness strategy, which in AdMob’s case, allows developers and advertisers to users across multiple mobile platforms. He says that the AdMob network currently includes more than 50,000 mobile applications across iOS, Android, and webOS platforms.

Similar to the iOS and Android experience, developers using Windows Phone 7 SDK can use the format to integrate AdMob advertising into apps, control where ads appear, and what types of ads are served. The ad unit supports a variety of post click actions including opening a webpage and linking directly to the App Marketplace. And the Windows Phone 7 beta SDK currently supports text and banner ads and can be downloaded by creating a new site on AdMob.

AdMob has also updated iOS and Android SDKs with HTML5 support for its ad units, allowing advertisers to create more rich media advertisements that can be viewed across platforms. Previously, the formats were written in Google/AdMob’s own markup language, but with the addition of HTML5, Schaaf says that the format gives advertisers and developers more openness across many platforms. He says that HTML5 allows advertisers to do more with less coding and also allows for more seamless transitions and formats on devices. Additionally, AdMob is also supporting full screen interstitial formats for tablets on iOS and Android.

The move to HTML5 isn’t surprising for AdMob, considering that Google is a huge proponent of HTML5.

From the ad requests standpoint, AdMob appears to be growing under the Google umbrella. We heard earlier this year that AdMob is currently receiving 2 billion ad requests per day, a data point which has quadrupled over the past year. But there have been rumors that the transition isn’t going so great over at the Googleplex, which is of course contradictory to Google’s growth stats.

Regardless, mobile advertising is a multi-billion industry, and there’s no doubt that Google will continue to innovate so that it can take a piece of this enormously large pie.

Mobile is finally delivering on its promise. All the technology is in place and consumers are engaging in droves, on smartphones in particular. However, many businesses still aren’t hearing the call. Most have not yet meaningfully engaged with mobile consumers and adapted their strategies to capitalize on the mobile opportunity. But, it’s still not too late to be early to mobile. Here are five simple steps that businesses should take —today—to build the foundation of their mobile marketing and commerce strategy.

1) Create a mobile specific site

Give consumers a great mobile experience when they visit your site on their mobile phone. Considering that over 50% of Americans are going to have a smartphone and there will be an estimated one billion mobile internet users by the end of the year, it’s pretty astounding that only 21% of Google’s large advertisers have mobile-optimized websites.

What’s a mobile specific site? It’s a website that’s been designed specifically for a smartphone: it prioritizes what’s important for a user on the go, it features elements that are easy to see and interact with (instead of minuscule type, or rich media components that may or may not load), and ultimately, it leads to happy users, and customers.

A mobile optimized site isn’t a desktop optimized site. In fact, it may be just the opposite: websites that look great on the desktop may be illegible, or require endless zooming-in, or may not work at all on mobile. The mobile web is not a smaller, portable version of the desktop web. When designing a mobile site, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Make site navigation easier, put key action-items front and center, and build for the on-the-go user. Think about the mobile behavior of your customers and design for it.

2) Think Local

It’s often said that mobile searches have more ‘intent’; but what does that mean? It’s a fancy way of saying that when people are looking for information on a mobile device they intend to act on it. Fast. For example, when you search for a restaurant on mobile, you’re probably hungry and want to grab a bite to eat somewhere close by. Or, if you’re trying to track down a boutique’s address at 2pm on Saturday, it’s more likely that you’ll visit the boutique and return the shirt that doesn’t fit than it would be if you searched for the same boutique at 11am on Monday morning from your desk at work. Mobile users search for information because they want to take action. After looking up a local business on their smart phone, 61% of users have called the business and 59% have visited .

Because of this increased intent, location is exceptionally relevant to mobile users, and should be especially important to marketers as well. If users intend to act quickly on the information they find on mobile, they’re more likely to take action somewhere near their locations. As a business, if you’re trying to reach a mobile consumer, understanding geo-targeted advertising campaigns and products is critical.

3) Get ‘Personal’

200 million videos are viewed every day on Mobile YouTube, an increase of over 3x from last year. 65 million minutes (over 125 years!) of Angry Birds games are played every day on mobile. We’re glued to our mobile devices, and engaged like we’ve never been before. There’s an opportunity to connect with consumers in ways that are both special, and only possible, because they’re on mobile.

Here’s an example. Not long ago, Adidas ran a campaign called ‘Basketball is a Brotherhood’. The goal was to enable players to connect with the brand, and each other, in a unique way. To accomplish this, they built out a mobile property that enabled high school basketball players to trade voicemails with Adidas-sponsored basketball pro players. Users could visit the mobile site, call their favorite pro, and maybe even get a call back, all from their mobile device.

Sure, Adidas’ campaign was mobile-specific. But, it was also mobile-special; Adidas wasn’t just taking advantage of the unique capabilities of a platform, they were also enabling a connection that can only happen when a high schooler with Kevin Garnett’s poster on his wall gets a voicemail from their favorite NBA Power Forward. These types of connections represent the promise of mobile

4) Track your mobile site separately

The web not only looks and feels different on a mobile device, but people engage with it differently, at different moments of the day, and often with different objectives. Google sees a 50% spike in usage on weekends for Google Maps for mobile and in general, mobile engagement increases in the evenings and on weekends, when people are away from their desks, or on the go.

Mobile is distinct from desktop; your mobile site tracking should be distinct as well. When you separate your desktop and mobile website data, you’ll better understand the users visiting your site, what phones they have, and what actions they are taking. You can then use this data to optimize your website and improve it, along with your campaigns.

Moreover, think about how you might be able reach a mobile-specific audience and consumer as well. For example, as people are able to make and adjust travel plans on-the-go from their mobile devices, they are increasingly booking travel arrangements on a much shorter timeline, and sometimes even after they’ve arrived at a destination. Anyone with a mobile device that’s gotten stuck in miserable traffic, or needed to shuffle a schedule to accommodate a client, or just needed an extra day or two on the beach, probably understands this. Mobile is transforming the travel business, and others too; think about how mobile is changing your business, and build campaigns that will enable you to reach these new consumers.

5) Iterate, Iterate, Iterate

We’re in the earliest chapters of mobile’s history – change is in the air and hopefully will be for a long time. Remember, before January 2007, the iPhone didn’t yet exist, and neither did Android handsets, or any app marketplaces. The rate of change in mobile over the last five years is astounding and you need to have a fast development cycle to stay ahead of that change.

The tactics and strategies that work today may be very different from what works months, or even weeks, from now. Make sure to iterate regularly on your site, your mobile apps, and campaigns. Test to see what works and learn from actual usage. You should be excited to dive-in to mobile, and be prepared to continue working on your mobile ads, websites, and apps.

Google’s mobile ad network AdMob is releasing a number of staggering statistics today as the network begins its first full year under the Google umbrella. Google says that AdMob is receiving 2 billion ad requests per day, a data point which has quadrupled over the past year. To put that in perspective, as of May of 2010, AdMob was receiving nearly 1 billion ad requests per month.

To give you a picture of the current pace of mobile advertising, Google receives more ad requests in a single day than AdMob received for the entire month of December 2007 (a growth rate of 30 times in just over three years).

AdMob says that more than 100 million unique Android and iOS devices requested an ad each month, which is double the rate over the last six months. Google says that AdMob is seeing a significant amount of growth in international markets. Nine countries in the AdMob network generated more than a billion monthly ad requests in December 2010, up from just one country a year ago. In fact, the strongest regional growth in monthly ad requests over the past year has come from Asia (564%), Western Europe (471%) and Oceania (363%).

We know that AdMob has been steadily growing within Google, most recently serving its 300 billionth mobile ad since 2007 at a record-breaking fast pace for the company.

Perhaps this recent data is a sign that Google may start publishing the monthly statistics and data surrounding AdMob again (the company stopped discontinued the reports in May 2010 for “a few months”).

Nethercutt, the former VP of Sales for AdMob and the first ad exec hired by the startup back in its early days, joined Google as a Team Manager for Mobile Display Advertising following the acquisition. Prior to working for AdMob, Nethercutt helped grow a team of sales, account management, and sales operations staff at YouTube (Prior to its acquisition by YouTube). He also worked in sales and management roles at Yahoo and DoubleClick.

Nethercutt will draw on is mobile ad experience in his new position. In his role at Mojiva, Nethercutt will be responsible for driving revenue to expand the company’s footprint in mobile advertising and publishing. Mojiva develops a self service ad platform that allows advertisers and publishers to manage mobile ad campaigns.

One of the most successful mobile games right now is Angry Birds, which has been downloaded more than 30 million times across different mobile platforms, with 12 million of those being paid downloads on iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. But on Android, the game is free, and is supported by advertising. Angry Birds has been downloaded more than 5 million times on Android since that version launched in October. “By end of year, we project earnings of over $1 million per month with the ad-supported version of Angry Birds,” says Peter Vesterbacka, the “Mighty Eagle” behind the game at Rovio Mobile.

He appears in the video above taken by Google’s AdMob team, which kicks off a mobile developer series. In the video, he doesn’t mention the $1 million a month figure, but he does reveals some other stats, such as the fact that the apps have an 80 percent retention rate, measured by the number of people who download updates. And on the iPhone alone, people spend a collective 65 million minutes a day playing the game.

He also talks about different ways to make money from mobile games—whether that is paid downloads, advertising, or toys. (Expect to see ads for the Angry Birds plush toys in the game itself).

Google says that iPhone and Android applications developers in the AdMob network will now be able to integrate Google AdSense ads within their app when an AdMob ad is not available. Not only will this additional ad inventory allow publishers to always fill their ad spaces, but Google AdSense advertisers now have access to advertise on “thousands” of mobile apps in AdMob’s network, such as Rovio’s ‘Angry Birds’. AdSense Inventory includes local ads and click-to-call ads, says Google’s Jason Spero.

One potential drawback for publishers is that they will not be able to filter the types of AdSense ads that run in their app. Those who filter their AdMob ad inventory will have to opt-in to the AdSense feature. In terms of backend integration for publishers, developers who are using AdMob’s latest recent version of the SDK will not have to update their code and will continue to receive a single check from AdMob each month that includes revenue from both AdSense and AdMob ads.

When I asked Spero about the rumored trouble in Google-AdMob land, he said that he couldn’t comment on the recent departures but said that with this first integration, the team is extremely fired up about launch, and focused on creating new products that leverage everything that AdMob and Google both bring to the table.

Spero added that from this point, the AdMob and Google teams are planning to launch a number of new integration that combine the two technologies in the future.

One thing is for sure. Despite possible trouble in paradise, AdMob continues to be an appealing platform to both advertisers and publishers, and is launching new and innovative products to reel in both parties. And that is sure to translate into major dollars for Google.

It sounds like Google is getting the short end of the stick here — Hamoui has actually only been able to work at the search giant for five months, because the AdMob/Google acquisition was held up by an endless federal investigation that stretched on from November 2009 through the end of May 2010. That’s an eternity in this highly competitive space.

From what we’ve heard AdMob’s employees had their incentives begin to vest as soon as the deal completed in October/November 2009, not when it was ultimately approved in May 2010. In fact, we’ve heard that Hamoui isn’t the only AdMob executive to leave after a short stay — we’re working to get a more detailed list of other personnel who may have also left Google.

A Google spokesperson gave us this statement:

“Omar has decided to leave AdMob and Google for personal reasons. He built a fantastic business in a short period of time, and we wish him all the best. Mobile advertising – across search and display – is now a billion dollar business for Google, with AdMob a key part of that. Google is fortunate to have a great team of leaders who are driving the next phase of rapid growth and innovation across all our mobile ads products.”

Update: Other AdMob departures include:

• Ali Diab, AdMob’s VP of Product Management and Business Operations, who founded Caturra Capital, LLC, a hedge fund specializing in the tech sector
• Niren Hiro, AdMob VP of Business Development, who left in May to become the CEO of CrowdStar

Similar to the iPhone formats, the new SDK for Android devices includes interactive video and interactive interstitial ad units. The ad network will dynamically identify screen resolution, size, and network connection speed to serve users the best ad for each device. And Android developers have more interactive options when including ads in their applications. The new ad units themselves can be placed when an app opens or within an app.

AdMob says that it has run over 120 video and interactive interstitial campaigns for clients such as Universal Pictures, Best Buy and Seattle’s Best Coffee. Google’s big push for AdMob has been the ability to serve interactive mobile ads across many mobile platforms, whereas single-platform options like iAd have been focused on only serving iOS devices, limiting reach for advertisers. Interestingly, Apple is also eying the video ad space and is rumored to be developing iAds for video.

While there are many players in the mobile advertising market, there’s no doubt that there’s a little bit of a rivalry between Google’s ad network AdMob and Apple’s new foray into mobile ads, iAd. Some say iAd is taking some of AdMob’s share in the mobile ad market thanks to better performance. One of the cornerstones to iAd’s claimed success is that the format was developed by the company that actually makes both the device and OS and provides a more engaging experience. The same theory is probably what has made RIM enter the mobile ad wars, recently launching a mobile ad platform for BlackBerry phones. But AdMob contends that its platform is still appealing to advertisers because it allows brands to reach consumers across many different mobile platforms with similar engaging ad formats, whereas programs like iAd restrict advertisers to one device. Oh, and there’s the minimum $1 million ad buy Apple reportedly requires to serve ads through its network.

Of course, it’s not surprising that AdMob is pushing its multi-platform network as its competitive advantage; the openness of Google’s network is its badge of honor. But some well-known advertisers are actually choosing AdMob because of its multi-platform support for many devices, especially with the ability to target both iPhone and Android users (which is a steadily growing population).

For example, Seattle’s Best Coffee chose AdMob for its campaign promoting the coffee company’s “Latte In A Can” product. Robson Grieve, the President of Creature, the ad agency responsible for the campaign, said that AdMob was the most logical choice because it was the “best chance to get a cross plaform consolidated campaign.”

The campaign included ads ranging from standard banners, animated banners with text links, to full page interactive interstitials on both Android and Apple devices. So far, he says performance has been great. More than 139,000 users were delivered to Seattle’s Best Coffee’s mobile site from the ads, and the full page expandable units had an interaction rate of 5.7 percent. The Interactive Interstitial formats earned a click-through rate of 5.4 percent, while CPM placements averaged a CTR of 0.9 percent.

Another well-known brand, car manufacturer Infiniti recently ran a cross-platform campaign across a range of devices including iPhone, Android and iPad with a series of advertisement formats that promised the interactivity and engagement of Apple’s iAd.

Of course, Google’s AdMob also helps companies target Android devices as well. Restaurant reservation platform OpenTable also chose AdMob to promote its Android app. The company ran CPC text ads on mobile websites and more than 16,000 Android apps on the network. During the campaign, daily downloads of the app increased by 125 percent and installs took place over 75 different Android devices. OpenTable also ran and iOS app promotion campaign with AdMob as well, and saw positive results.

On the other hand, Dictionary.com recently ran a similar ad campaign with Apple’s iAd on iPhone devices, and saw its overall iPhone mobile app eCPM (effective cost-per-thousand impressions) increase by 177 percent. Dictionary.com declined to reveal CTRs but did say that iAds are performing two to three times better than the average mobile display ads. Other brands have also seen positive engagement results with the iAd platform. For example, an ad for Dove products saw a “double-digit” percentage of users who wanted more information about the product that was advertised, with 20 percent of viewers returning to the advertisement. In august, Nissan reported CTRs for its iAd were five times the click-through-rates of same campaign on websites.

Of course, it’s tough to make an accurate comparison of AdMob’s data without comparable data from Apple’s iAd platform. We’ve received some statistics from the developer side on how much iAds are earning (which have been a mixed bag). A source with knowledge of the technology tells us that iAd CTRs are 0.5 percent to 0.8 percent generally, sometimes as high as 1 to 1.5 percent. One iAd developer claimed iAd CTRs as high as 11.8 percent (that’s compared to the 0.9 percent for the Seattle’s Best campaign). This seems high and could be an outlier. And this is not an apples to apples comparison (no pun intended) because we’re not sure if the CTRs are for the same type of ad format.

This iAd data on CTRs is inline with other reports as well. On this Apple developer forum, a user anecdotally reported that the developer’s app was seeing zero clicks on 700 iAd impressions. In contrast, the developer writes, AdMob reports around 10 clicks per 2000, in his experience. Another developer writes, ” I had 3000 impressions and 23 clicks on AdMob (0.77% CTR), I had 2200 and 14 clicks on iAds (0.61% CTR).”

Jason Spero, Google’s director of mobile for the Americas (he previously ran North America for AdMob before it was acquired by Google); says that because mobile is a collection of devices with different size screens, OS platforms, speeds and more, Google is trying to minimize the technology that advertisers need to deal with.

There are a few things we know for sure. With a $1 million minimum ad spend, iAd is definitely not going to replace AdMob’s more flexible advertising network. And with continued growth in the number of iPhone users, Apple’s iAd platform will be appealing for those big brands who can afford it. However, mobile advertising is on track to become a $1 billion market next year and there seems to be enough room for everyone to play nicely and make a few bucks.

In a Tweet just sent from Google Mobile Ads account, the company said that its mobile ad network, AdMob, has hit a new milestone today. AdMob has served a whopping 300 billion mobile ads since 2007. The network added another 100 billion ads since May, when it posted its 200 billionth ad milestone.

To give you a perspective of how fast the AdMob is growing in terms of ads served; it took nine months to get to 200 billion ads from 100 billion in August of 2009, and only 5 months to get to 300 billion. Clearly, growth is accelerating for the network.

Google announced its $750 million acquisition of AdMob last year, but the closing of the deal was drawn out due to concerns from the FTC over anti-trust issues. Over six months after announcing its plans to acquire AdMob, Google finally closed the deal at the end of May, a week after the FTC unanimously approved the deal.

While AdMob used to publish monthly statistics and data surrounding its mobile ad network, the company stopped discontinued the reports in May for “a few months.” In terms of how many monthly requests the network is seeing; we know that in May received 10 million mobile ad requests. I’m sure that number is higher now.

Today at our Social Currency CrunchUp in Palo Alto, CA, James Lamberti, VP of Global Research and Marketing for InMobi, sat down with our Michael Arrington to tell us a bit about mobile advertising.

InMobi is the largest independent mobile ad network in the world. Overall, they’re number two behind Google’s AdMob. That earned them an $8 million investment from Kleiner Perkins and Sherpalo Ventures a couple weeks ago. But what’s particularly interesting about InMobi is how well they’re doing outside the U.S.

Out of inMobi’s 16.9 billion mobile ad impressions globally, 2.6 billion are in Africa, more than the US’s 2 billion. 10 billion are in Asia, no surprise considering inMobi was founded in India and had more time to develop reach, while Europe follows Africa with 1.6 billion and the Middle East .5 billion. InMobi’s mobile eCPM development is highest in Europe at 29%, with North American coming in a close second at 24%.

When inMobi’s development rankings, are stack ranked by country, Australia comes in first due to its high adoption of the iPhone and Malaysia performs at number two. Not surprisingly the iPhone platform dominates inMobi’s marketshare the US, being responsible for 38.2% of all mobile ad impressions. Globally Nokia trumps other platforms serving inMobi ads, at 22.2% of the market.

Lamberti says that InMobi’s biggest growth markets are in the US, Japan, and South America and the US, partially because of the benefits from Google Ad Mob changes on the iPhone. While 60% of all mobile iPhone impressions are still in the US, inMobi is now poised to to monetize the 40% that aren’t.

Video and slides from their presentation below.

Mobile advertising is currently a billion dollar market and we’ve witnessed tech giants like Google and Apple move into the space with the acquisitions of mobile ad networks AdMob and Quattro Wireless, respectively. AdMob is now part of Google’s mobile advertising business and Apple is using Quattro to power its new ad format, iAds. But there is another player that has silently been growing its business under the radar to become a dominant network in mobile advertising: Millennial Media.

Currently, Millenial has the largest U.S. reach out of all the networks in terms of audience size according to Nielsen; with ads reaching 63 million of a total of 77 million mobile web users in the U.S., or 81% of the U.S. mobile web.

Despite being one of the “big three” in the still-small mobile ad space, Millennial is relatively unknown, while its competitors have seen prominent coverage in the media. Besides its monthly reports on mobile ad traffic, Millennial has avoided some of the drama that has been taking place in the industry. I caught up with the company’s CEO and co-founder Paul Palmieri to talk about how Millennial catapulted from a bootstrapped Baltimore-based startup to the largest independent mobile advertising company.

Palmieri is a seasoned vet in the wireless and advertising industries.  He ran the consumer mobile data arm at Verizon and developed a fledgling mobile ad network at Advertising.com. Unfortunately, as the bubble burst, Advertising.com cut Palmieri’s group before it was eventually sold to AOL. But Palmieri always thought there was more potential in the mobile advertising industry, especially as mobile web usage grew. While iPhones and Android phones were nonexistent in 2004, Palmieri knew that the market would produce more technologically advanced phones than the current offering at the time, the Palm Treo. In 2006, he teamed up with another Advertising.com alum, engineer Chris Brandenburg to work on developing a company that could monetize mobile display advertising.

Fast forward another four years, and now Millennial Media, which Palmieri jokingly calls the “quiet giant,” is competing with the likes of Google and Apple in mobile advertising.  The company is still small with only 85 full-time employees. I was actually surprised that Millennial had less than 100 staff members considering it is one of the largest mobile advertising networks in the world. Palmieri counters that Millennial’s proprietary technologies have helped not only keep customers happy but also helped keep the company lean.

The company offers a mobile media planning platform, called MYDAS, that quickly creates and implements advertising plans; in fact, all sales reps carry iPads to meetings to demo the product and actually create campaigns on the technology. Umpire, another Millennial product, is a realtime ad serving platform that allows publishers to dynamically switch between ad networks based on impressions and performance.

Millennial also provides advertisers with highly optimized audience creation and retargeting technologies, which include preset anonymous audience segments that Millennial has identified through its own interactions. Ad viewers are enrolled in “Audiences” based on their observed behaviors on sites, survey participation, and click-stream data. Once enrolled, users can be specifically targeted in campaigns that Millennial’s advertisers purchase and leverage for future re-targeting purposes.  Millennial claims this ability to target ads to highly segmented audiences promises advertisers with a 5-times lift in interaction rates.  The  company also notes that it makes a clear disclosure of these techniques and provides a simple opt-out mechanism. Nevertheless, online ad targeting is a political hot potato, and when you add in location targeting, it could get tricky.

On the device side, Palmieri highlights that Millennial’s platform independence creates more diversification and thus reaches more mobile users. In a given month, 45% of the impressions on the network are from smartphones, roughly 39% from feature phones, and around 16% from connected devices such as tablets and gaming systems.

One of the little-known secrets of Millennial is that it’s more than just a mobile ad network. The company also operates and manages private mobile ad networks for large media companies and conglomerates that have multiple apps and sites, essentially powering a self-service ad network for these companies. Millennial also has a deal with a “prominent internet media company” (Palmieri declined to name the company) that has completely outsourced its mobile advertising to Millennial.

While Millennial may not generate the press hype that AdMob and Quattro have seen, the company has certainly attracted the attention of technology’s leading venture capital firms. The company has raised $38.3 million to date in venture funding from Charles River Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Bessemer Venture Partners and Columbia Capital.

While Palmieri won’t disclose concrete revenue and sales numbers, he told me that revenue has been steadily growing and the company is well past its target revenue for the first half of the year. According to IDC research published last December, Millennial Media was on target to make $35 million in U.S. mobile advertising revenue for 2009. AdMob’s revenue was estimated at $31 million (we reported a $40 million run-rate at the end of last year) and Quattro Wireless was reported to have seen $20 million in revenue for the year. Palmieri says the company isn’t cash-flow positive yet but will hit that mark this year.

Still, Millennial is playing in a competitive space with two of the most powerful tech companies on the planet, Google, and Apple.  Either one could have bought Millennial, but they decided to go with its rivals instead.  Remember, Apple makes the iPhone and iPad—two devices that dominate the mobile advertising market. And Google is behind all the Android devices.

With the launch of iAds, Apple CEO Steve Jobs said that he expects 48% of spending on mobile advertising in the United States from July through December of 2010 to go to Apple’s iAd platform for the iPhone and iPad. But Palmieri says he isn’t worried. “We’ve been offering the same rich-media formats as iAds for years now,” says Palmieri. While there is certainly a novelty to iAds, Palmieri expects Millennial’s ads to perform as well if not better than Apple’s ads.

Millennial has also been making acquisitions to boost its offerings to advertisers and publishers. Earlier this year the company acquired startup Tap Metrics, a company that provides mobile analytics to developers. And the company is actively looking to make more purchases in the space, says Palmieri.

The looming question in everyone’s minds is whether Millennial will sell to a big technology company looking to take a piece of the mobile advertising pie, such as Microsoft. While Palmieri says that an acquisition isn’t something he’s totally against, his focus at the moment is on taking the company public in the next year or so.

George Zachary, a partner at Charles River Ventures and board member of Millennial, also feels confident that the startup can be a public company in the next year. Zachary credits the company’s success partly to the core ideals of the founders in not wanting to sacrifice quality, despite growing fast.

If mobile advertising is going to be as huge as everyone thinks, there is plenty of room for more than two players.  Millennial is proving that a non-Silicon Valley based startup with the right technology, talent and leadership can find success in a competitive field that includes both Google and Apple. And with a possible IPO in 2011, it looks like Millennial won’t be a “quiet giant” for much longer.

Mobile ad network AdMob (now part of Google) released its final Mobile Metrics report today (embedded below), at least for a while. AdMob gathers data from millions of phones and mobile devices which serve up its ad impressions, including almost 44 million iOS devices (iPhones, iPod Touches, and iPads). The decision to stop disclosing the data may have something to do with its new owner, Google, wanting to assess what it wants to let out there, but it could also be tied to the fact that AdMob might no longer have access to any iPhone data since Apple is specifically threatening to block it.

Whatever the reason, AdMob’s reports have proven to be a rich source of data on the mobile Web across platforms since mobile ad impressions on the mobile Web and in mobile apps are a decent proxy for mobile Web/app usage overall. So let’s dig in.

Over the past two years, mobile ad impressions from smartphones have grown from 22 percent of the total to 46 percent in May, 2010.  Apple iOS devices account for the largest portion worldwide, with 40 percent share. But as you can see in the chart above, that share has been declining since it peaked above 50 percent in November, 2009.  Over that time, Android has been steadily taking share, rising to 26 percent.

The ratio of handset market share to mobile Web and app usage is not directly correlated. Nokia’s Symbian has a 44 percent share of handsets worldwide, but only 24 percent of of mobile Web/app usage. In contrast, Apple only has 15 percent handset market share, and Android has 10 percent, but together they account for two thirds of mobile Web and app usage.

On a worldwide basis, Apple devices still outnumber Android in terms of mobile ad impressions by a factor of almost 3.5 to 1. In the U.S., that ratio is about 2 to 1.  According to an AdMob survey, iPhone users are more satisfied (91 percent) than Android (84 percent) or Palm’s WebOS users (69 percent).  Android’s 84 percent satisfaction is pretty good, but there is still a gap with the iPhone.

Some other interesting stats from the report:

• While the iPhone is the single biggest device driving mobile ad impressions, Android phones account for 7 of the top 10 handsets (the other two are Nokias).
• Only 58% of iPad users are in the U.S. The next biggest countries are Japan (5%), UK (4%), China(4%), and Canada (3%).
• Android is less international, with 66% of users in the U.S.  But the No. 2 country for Android is China (13%), followed by the UK (4%).
• HTC and Motorola phones account for 83% of Android usage.
• Twice as many iPhone users download paid apps as Android users.
• WiFi is huge.  Nearly a quarter of U.S. mobile traffic comes over WiFi. The biggest percentage of WiFi requests (nearly two thirds) comes from the iPod Touch—which is a WiFi-only device—but 35% of iPhone traffic goes over WiFi as well

Thanks to an SEC filing, another detail emerged today about Google’s acquisition of mobile ad network AdMob. We already knew the $750 million Google-AdMob acquisition was a cash and stock deal but we didn’t know the breakdown between the two. According to an SEC filing submitted by Google today, the search giant sold $530 million worth of stock as part of the deal, indicating that AdMob (and its investors) may have taken home the remainder, $220 million, in cash (because of some accounting issues, this number may not be exact).

So was AdMob happy with the split between cash and stock? I guess that depends on whether they think Google’s stock will keep going up. Google paid for the bulk of the deal with stock, and the deal will hardly make a dent in its huge cash reserves (the company has $26.5 billion in the bank).

The deal itself was drawn out due to concerns from the FTC over anti-trust issues. Over six months after announcing its plans to acquire AdMob, Google finally closed the deal at the end of May, a week after the FTC unanimously approved the deal.