Filed under: Business, News, Google
With AdMob purchase, there's really no escaping Google advertising now
Anyone who owns an iPhone or iPod touch is all too familiar with AdMob. Their tiny "don't mind me, I'm not really all that intrusive" ads power truckloads of freebies in the App Store.While you might not love AdMob, someone does. That someone is Google.
Drawn together like half-cut, lonely singles in a dimly-lit bar at happy hour, the two are about to enter a long-term relationship. As in permanent. Today, Google announced that they have purchase AdMob for the tidy sum of $750 million dollars.
That's a whole lotta dough, but keep in mind that Google is ultimately an advertising company. AdMob's strong position in mobile ads is a juicy acquisition, especially with 1) the number of Android-powered handsets rapidly rising and 2) AdMob's recent launch of its Android advertising platform.
The move also gives Google easy access to gobs and gobs of delicious usage data from zillions of mobile users that they may have been missing out on. That data gets fed into AdSense, making it an even more attractive option for advertisers.
Here's a thought, though... At $750 million, Google could have simply bough 3.9 million people an iPod Touch and said "here you go, but we're going to track everything you do!" Hell, I would've signed up for that.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
