A Blog From Behind the Trenches

We have just announced Opera's acquisition of mobile advertising company AdMarvel.

Google and Apple have both recently bought their own mobile advertising companies, and I guess Opera needs to position itself to remain competitive in the future. It seems that mobile advertising is where everyone is seeing the big bucks in the coming years, and it seems like a good idea to expand into yet another area and diversify our business.

The big question is of course if you can make money from ads and at the same time make it useful to the user. Is it even possible to turn this into something the user will actually find useful?

Well, think about how we started making money from the desktop version: We introduced the search field which is now standard in most browsers, and offered a highly useful feature which we could also make money from. Basically, most of our desktop revenue is ad revenue, and this "ad-sponsored" feature is one of the most popular features in today's browsers.

If we can do the same thing on mobile phones, I think we've got a winner on our hands.

I don't know exactly what we are planning to do, but I'm pretty sure we are going to make it as useful and non-intrusive as possible.