There are a lot of misconceptions this morning about Opera's acquisiton of AdMarvel today, which point to a fundamental misunderstanding about what exactly goes on in online and mobile advertising.
Many articles you'll find out there today say AdMarvel is an "ad network," but it simply is not. An ad network links ad publishers with Web sites, apps, feeds, SMS, MMS, video, and other potential places to advertise.
AdMarvel doesn't serve ads to these places, but instead provides revenue, traffic and campaign analytics to companies looking to start their own targeted ad networks or to companies that have already built up a network and are looking to track and manage their campaigns. It is an advertising mediator and service provider.
By acquiring AdMarvel, Opera isn't itself creating an ad network, but rather a platform upon which new ad networks can be built, or into which existent ones can integrate. Indeed, AdMarvel already sources and manages advertising from AdMob, RingRing Media, Google, JumpTap, Admoda, and many others.
"Combining our monetization and analytics platform with the Opera browser and widget platform will create a new intelligent platform, where local and global advertisers can interact with a highly instrumented mobile audience," AdMarvel's CEO Mahi de Silva said in a statement today.
Details of the acquisition have not been disclosed.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010
