Google to Drop AdMob Mobile Web Ads, Tells Advertisers to Use AdSense Instead

Google has been very bullish on mobile advertising as the company thinks, perhaps rightfully so, that the mobile web is the new frontier. It's been working on several of its own ad products for mobile devices, but it also bought AdMeld, in a somewhat controversial acquisition, which also offered several mobile ad tools.

Some of the tools overlapped and advertisers were sometimes confused about which of the two Google services available for mobile devices, AdSense and AdMob, to use.

Google is now making the distinction between the two clear, AdMob is for applications, AdSense is for the web.

Currently, there is still some overlap, but Google is working on focusing the two products directly at their intended purposes.

"Our teams have been working hard to combine the best of both products and make life simple and seamless for our customers, while making sure we have a broad range of products and features to suit all our customers' needs," Clay Bavor, Product Management Director for Mobile Ads at Google, wrote.

"Earlier this year, for example, all AdSense for Mobile Applications beta participants switched to AdMob, which is now our primary, specialized solution for app developers," he announced.

"We're now pleased to offer a unified, specialized service for mobile web site publishers – AdSense, which we encourage AdMob mobile web publishers to move to," he said.

To this end, Google will stop serving ads for WAP mobile websites via AdMob at the end of this month. Further down the line, AdMob ads for full HTML-sites, i.e. ones that run on devices will fully-capable browsers, iPhones, Android devices but some older phones as well, will also be seized.

The plan is to move those ads to AdSense as well, so Google is giving website owners and advertisers notice ahead of the changes.