[en] AdMob now serves AdSense
I was checking my AdMob account this morning and I noticed a new option: Enable AdSense. 
This option allows AdMob users to not just publish ads from the AdMob network, but also from Google's AdSense network. After a bit of searching the web for a bit I found that this feature has been announced a while ago on Google Mobile Ads Blog. The feature was supposed to be rolled out gradually.
So, what does this mean to Android developers?
It means a couple of things. The first and most obvious is that the rolling out is going very well and by this time most people have this option in their AdMob accounts.
The second thing, and the more important one has to do with fill rates and relevance. A few weeks ago I was talking to Jacob from Kiloo about how ads work with Android, more exactly how they don't work. My theory was that AdMob was inefficient because of two things:
- Although they are a subsidiary of Google they still have to compete with AdSense since most people don't know they are the same company
- Because they have been acquired less than a year ago, AdMob has yet to be included into Google AdSense and thus it can't make use of all the information Google has of its customers. You see, every Android user has a Google account and that contains a lot of information relevant to adversising. Everything users do on their phones or desktops while logged into their Google account is tracked, from email content to Google searches (with regards to privacy, of course). All this information is used to find out what each user is interested in. Without this information the ads wouldn't be as valuable and thus, less clicks, less money for publishers, less publishers, less advertisers and so on.
I've activated the option on my two little Android games: Hangman and Chiulangiul:Geografie and they work. Furthermore it looks like the fill rate is bigger now. I am quite anxious to see how ads will perform now.
On the long run
Ad revenue increase will certainly motivate developers to build better applications and raise the general quality level of apps on the Android Market.