Google To Shut Down Mobile Ad Aggregator AdWhirl, Encourages Developers to Use AdMob Mediation
Google announced to developers today that it would be shutting down AdWhirl, a platform that allows app developers to switch between different ad networks on the fly. For those of you not familiar with AdWhirl, it was a part of AdMob, acquired by the mobile ad network just months before AdMob was bought by Google for $750 million.
Google wrote in a letter (inserted below) addressed to developers that they will have until September 30 to figure out where they would like to move their ads. Of course, Google is encouraging developers to migrate to AdMob Mediation, a competing tool that it launched after the acquisition while continuing to support AdWhirl. Google goes on to say that while developers can continue to use AdWhirl, (via open source code) they will not be involved with supporting or hosting it.
As expected, the news is not going over well with a vast majority of developers. The timeline is simply too short leaving them with little options.
“We developers understand that it might be discontinued in the future, but terminating this in three months is just too fast for us to migrate,” writes the developer who forwarded the letter to Tech Crunch. “A lot of developers depended on most of their revenue through this product.”
Here’s what other developers have to say:
“Some of us have used AdWhirl for 4 years and have tons of apps to update for this change,” one wrote. “When you killed off Google Ads and forced us to use AdMob at least you gave us till the end of the year. What about the users that don’t upgrade, will you continue serving them ads?”
Eric Leichtenschlag, an engineer with AdMob, notes that AdWhirl.com will also be shut down, so users will not be able to log into their accounts after September 30. For those apps that don’t migrate from the service, mediation will stop working. “This means we will return a 404 to the SDK and there will be a blank space where the ad used to be.”
As much of pain this will be developers, we can’t say that this comes a much of a shock. Considering Google earns more than half of all worldwide revenues in mobile ads (in 2013, eMarketer predicts Google will make nearly $9 billion out of global sales of nearly $16 billion), it has been making an aggressive move to streamline its mobile ad operations.
Google has been working at this by revamping AdMob’s developer tools in May, and integrating AdMob and AdWords. Google is eager to point out that the new system “works better” because it provides more ad formats, improved reporting, and will have Google to support it. Well, isn’t that just convenient.
The letter:
Dear AdWhirl by AdMob Developer,
AdWhirl has been supported by Google since 2010, when it became part of the Google family through the acquisition of AdMob. Since then, we’ve invested in helping AdMob developers serve ads in their apps from any number of ad networks through AdMob Mediation, which many developers use today. As we continue to improve AdMob Mediation, we’ve decided to retire AdWhirl, and will be discontinuing the service on 30 September 2013. The open source code for AdWhirl will still be available if anyone wants to run their own AdWhirl service.
AdMob Mediation is at no cost and more robust, with features like network-level reporting, country-level allocation and support for more ad formats. You can learn more about the specific features of AdMob Mediation here.
We encourage you to start using AdMob Mediation prior to 30 September. You’ll need an AdMob account to begin using AdMob Mediation. If you have one already you can find instructions for switching from AdWhirl here. If not, you can sign up for an AdMob account here.
Sincerely,
The Google AdMob Team
