We do not want make this blog the 500th industry review and also do not want to judge other companies active in the mobile market industry. But this news is big: yesterday it was announced that Google is buying AdMob for 750 million US Dollars, as you probably already know.  There are several rumors about the deal, especially about the reasons for the purchase price. But the reasons for the acquisition itself seem to be quite clear: Google wants to control the mobile advertising space. And according to some sources, AdMob is controlling about 80 percent of in-app advertising on iPhone.

Whatever way this is going in terms of effective monetization of mobile traffic, it substantiates the obvious fact that the iPhone and iPhone apps are here to stay for the long term (we know: common sense). And now we have a big player working on matching your app traffic with relevant advertisers. We have picked up the topic of increasing the customer value per download before on this blog, which is why we also think this news is relevant to every developer out there.

More money from ads means more money to spend on customer acquisition. Of course, the opposite holds true as well. So is this deal a positive for the app industry? A few comments on this post on Techcrunch and by now also several blogs are concerned that the increased market dominance will only lead to higher dependency on Google/AdMob and accordingly to lower revenue shares for publishers. Sure, no or less competition is never good for any market. On the other hand, this may enable AdMob to innovate even faster and leverage Google’s sales force and network, among others.

We are not so sure – what do you think? Will this have a positive effect on your app monetization? Maybe even make you forget about other strategies to increase your customer lifetime value and “go free” forever?