[Originally posted on Thursday, November 12, 2009 10:11:13 AM]
I firmly believe today's Admob is a product of small publishers or as some say hobbyist wapmasters. If you have spent some time on mobile internet you'll notice that majority of sites out there are small hobby sites that are hosted on free services. Admob gave those people a chance to make couple of dollars and enjoy their hobby more.
Anyone remembers first months of admob will remember their approach to the content of the sites that publish Admob adverts. Admob always had their content guidelines but they weren't strictly applied at first. This would be due to lack of staff to check each and every site, but whatever the reason is; it helped a lot to Admob and to their revenue stream. Everyone was happy.
But as Admob grew, number of unhappy publishers grew too. Simply because Admob started to force their content guidelines. Small/hobbyist publishers don't really care about content on their site or if they do, they usually haven't got enough time or resources to maintain compliance of their site with content guidelines. According to Admob they have 15K+ publishers. Although i have no real statistics I believe at least %70 of that 15K+ are small/hobbyist publishers.
Last content check by Admobe done by their outsourced team in India just before Google deal announced and many publisher accounts got closed including one that users Youtube api to create mobile Youtube access site who was publisher of Admob almost since they started business. Reason was that some video titles had keywords like SEXY - HOT . If you check Admob guidelines you'll see that there is no mentioning of keywords like SEXT - HOT being against their gudile lines and i myself seen many ads on Admob's network using those keywords.
From what I have read on Admob mailing list there is another problem. Admob's attitude to generated income of closed publisher accounts. They do not pay any money owed! They do not give you any answer about money owned to you! As small publisher (1) (2)
My worry is this type of attitude against small/hobbyist publishers will increase with Google's take over.
I hope I am wrong.