Proving actual market shares for the mobile advertising market is important as the Federal Trade Commission investigates Google’s proposed $750m acquisition of AdMob. The actual mobile internet usage data became available for the first time a few weeks ago when a new start up launched its online software package for a special introductory price of $6000.

The company’s management team knows a thing or two about the mobile and desktop search advertising and analytics markets. Their VP of Business Development spent seven years at Internet measurement company Hitwise, the VP of Marketing worked at comScore, M:Metrics, NPD Techworld and Jupiter Research and the CTO co-founded the company after leaving Medio Systems, a mobile search and advertising company. The company is called Ground Truth and they have worked out deals with several national and regional mobile carriers and other mobile platform partners to aggregate and then make anonymous actual usage data from the mobile internet.

As their home page explains, in military jargon, Ground Truth is used to describe the reality of a tactical situation, as opposed to what intelligence reports and mission plans assert the reality to be. A visit to the company’s website tells you that "The Ground Truth census reports are created using True View™, a patent-pending methodology to measure Mobile Internet usage. This data comes from every data-enabled device on the network. The resulting data measures Mobile Internet activity from any device, on any network, regardless of whether that activity is browser or application based."

As I later clarified, Ground Truth collects anything hitting the mobile internet- hits and clicks- including traffic when an app broke out to a mobile internet browser session- although it doesn’t collect data from within apps themselves. At launch, Ground Truth displayed the aggregated anonymous data from a sample size of around 2.7 million actual mobile internet users as they hadn’t yet reached agreement to include the data from all the carriers and mobile internet traffic sources. Ground Truth also didn't display information on the actual devices they collected from their sources since information on network exclusive handsets such as the Verizon Droid or the Apple iPhone would have revealed Ground Truth’s underlying data sources.

As a Ground Truth rep presented an online demo of their analytics package to me, I could hardly believe my eyes. For the first time, I was seeing real up-to-date data from the US mobile internet since the reports were updated with new data once a week. You could drill down into the detail of the largest mobile internet sites by visitors as well as click stream analysis such as traffic sources for those sites and the sites they visited next. Low and behold, there were the market shares for the originating advertising network sources. One company dominated the US mobile internet advertising market- and it wasn’t Google itself but rather their intended acquisition target AdMob.

According to Ground Truth’s data for February 7-13, 2010, AdMob dominated advertising on the mobile internet with a 75% market share. AdMob controlled three-quarters of all the ad clicks despite the fact that it didn’t serve ads on any of the top 4 most visited mobile internet sites (MySpace, Google, Facebook and Mocospace). During this same time period, Ground Truth’s data revealed that AdMob had placed ads on 374 of the 800 top trafficked mobile internet sites, or 46.75%. During the same time period, AdMob’s competitor Millennial Media served the ads on 240 (or 30%) of the top 800 mobile internet sites, with AdMob serving nearly six times as many clicks as them. Another AdMob competitor, Quattro Wireless- Apple’s mobile advertising acquisition- placed advertising on 142 (or 17.75%) of the top 800 sites, with AdMob being nearly 6.5 times as large as them.

Even the Ground Truth rep expressed his surprise during the demo at how much more "efficient" AdMob was as a mobile advertising network. Seeing this real data was my own personal “moment of truth”. I now understood for the first time why Google was willing to pay such a high price for AdMob- they had carved out the same dominant position in mobile advertising as Google itself had built in desktop internet advertising. Even Google’s own engineers can’t dispute Ground Truth’s data- this kind of analysis is exactly what they thrive on. I presented Ground Truth’s data to the Federal Trade Commission directly to give them the irrefutable justification they need to block Google’s proposed AdMob acquisition to protect competition- and therefore innovation- in the mobile advertising market.