Concentric Sky, Inc.

Our friends at Google contacted us last week to invite us into the AdSense for Mobile beta program. AdSense is one of those subtle technologies from which Google derives most of its revenue. I’ve always been curious about its inner workings, so I signed us up right away.

After some discussion, we settled on Astronomy Picture of the Day for iPhone as the best candidate for the program. Google is looking for high traffic applications from which it can derive usage metrics before going live with the new system. APOD for iPhone generates millions of screen views from around the world, with the majority coming from North America.

We reviewed the SDK and set to work. The first thing we noticed was how differently Google thinks about content than our current ad partner, AdMob. AdMob provides a simple interface where the developer can choose to enable/disable ads by genre and can filter ads based on keyword or URL. The controls are coarse, but useful. Google, in contrast, prefers to have a target page on the Internet that can be crawled for keywords.

Having the content on the Internet gives Google a key advantage over other ad networks. The domain hosting the target page can easily be correlated with Google’s massive traffic and search databases, allowing Google to use factors such as PageRank to serve up the most relevant ad content.

This is great news for developers - fine-tuned keyword control and the ability to make updates programmatically are must haves in our book.

But what it means to advertisers is not so clear. On the one hand, SEO techniques might have some influence over which ads get displayed for which products. This would be a huge boon to the largest advertisers and development companies. On the other hand, disreputable domains and SEO “black hat” techniques could cause far more damage to a brand than was possible before. This means advertisers must choose development partners even more carefully.

The second thing we noticed was the amount of polish that has gone into the AdSense for Mobile SDK. It was solid, self explanatory, and super simple to integrate. We had it in place and online in less than a day. Comparing this to AdMob and our other partner Pinch Media, we were impressed. Even the AdMob SDK - known for it’s simplicity - took longer to integrate.

After a bit of testing with Google’s beta network, we decided the system was solid and submitted the app to Apple. Apple’s app review process has always been kind to us, so we hope to have the updated app in the iTune store towards the end of the week. We’ll post an update when the app becomes available.

[UPDATE] After a bit of back and forth with Apple, the update finally made it into the App Store today, 11/5.