Under The Bridge

Why, things just keep hopping on the iPhone app advertising scene; you may recall the little AdMob vs. AdWhirl brouhaha we mentioned a while back that the general consensus was didn’t make AdMob look either competent or honest. Well, the decision of which to pick between those two for your advertising is now very much easier indeed: AdMob’s going with the if you can’t beat ‘em buy ‘em policy! From the AdWhirl blog:

Dear Developers,

As you may have already heard, we’ve been acquired by AdMob! In keeping with our values of transparency and openness, AdMob is open sourcing AdWhirl (both client and server) within the coming weeks. Not to fear, this means absolutely no changes to the functionality or support you have come to expect from AdWhirl and you’ll get full support for AdMob ads (coming soon). In addition, we’ll keep working hard on our roadmap w/ more features to help you guys succeed in the AppStore!

Interesting, that. What AdMob has to say is

Offering an open source solution will enable us to ensure advertisers and publishers a high quality experience with mobile advertising and publishing, and introduce an open, transparent choice into the market which has not existed to date. The open source solution will be available for all iPhone app developers and advertising networks, whether they currently work with AdMob directly or not.

One could be forgiven just a tad of skepticism regarding AdMob’s intentions here, though, so perhaps keeping an eye out for other mediation solutions might be time well spent. Not that we know of any other big ones (Tapjoy doesn’t seem to count as big) except Mobclix — you’ll let us know if we’ve missed others no doubt — and they are stoking the skepticism:

We would like to emphasize Mobclix’s continued dedication to being an open, neutral, and transparent ad exchange for the benefit of our developers and our ad networks. Our ad exchange offers developers complete transparency and performance, connecting them with the leading ad networks in the space – including Quattro Wireless, Videoegg, Millennial Media, Jumptap, Smaato, mDOTm, and others.

Mobclix always puts our developers first and chooses ads based on eCPM, not on a special preference to any one ad network. Mobclix believes that an open platform that is unbiased towards any ad network, such as we provide, is best for developers…

So there you go. AdMobWhirl mediation, Mobclix mediation, Tapjoy mediation, or any of the specific networks and other various players we try to keep track of here? What’s working out for you, Dear Readers?

h/t: iphonesb!