Apple just announced the addition of a native advertising platform for the new iPhone, iPod, and iPad OS 4.0. The people running AdMob over at google  must be trembling in their boots this very second. AdMob has secured hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, and was just purchased by Google for $750 million, almost exclusively on the iPhone advertising market share. That is all gone now.

Apple’s advertising platform is incredible and runs completely in HTML 5. The ads are incredibly smooth and function almost like an application in themselves. They have access to certain frameworks for use by applications as well such as location and accelerometer access.  In short, Apple’s new advertising platform offers an entire world of wonder that AdMob (or any other 3rd party platform) cannot even dream of.

What does this mean for publishers and advertisers? It appears to mean that mobile advertising just went pro. Advertisers can serve ads based on location and make them fully interactive. Publishers might finally actually make some real money! As for AdMob and all of the other platforms in the market that have been securing funding based on speculation, this looks to me like the end of the road.

I’ll let you draw your own conclusions for this particular quote simply because they are easy to draw. Here it is:

 ”We do not have any plans to become a worldwide ad agency. We tried to buy a company called admob, and Google came in and snatched them from us.”  - Steve Jobs

The new advertising platform is being released for use by developers as this article is being written and will be available via the new OS to end-users this summer.

When we turned on the exchange functionality previously, our revenues went down, and we got a ridiculously small number of downloads after testing several ad copy versions. We left the exchange turned off until about a week ago. This time after we turned it on we started to see a drastic increase in revenue due to the fact that we started receiving dramatically larger numbers of CPM impressions from the network. The downloads were still amazing low, to the tune of about 6 downloads/150,000 impressions, but our CPM revenue is up well over 1000% gradually over the course of about 6 days.

I am personally at a loss as to why this might happen. I have no idea how turning on exchange impressions could tick something in the formula that would start serving us more CPM ads or if there was some kind of human intervention either from the network or advertisers. Of course there is the chance that it could be a complete coincidence so we will rinse and repeat to check that out as well.

If you happen to have any insight or inside information that might shed some light on the mysterious AdMob numbers that we discuss from time-to-time please feel free to leave a comment.