Why did AOL buy Third Screen Media?

Alot has been written over the past 48hours of AOL’s purchase of Third Screen Media, but this deal has been on the table since early January. To give some background, Third Screen Media is a mobile advertising network which will now operate under the Advertising.com banner.

Considering AOL were looking to spend around $80m, this is a pretty big deal to both parties. So why mobile and why now?

The time is ripe for an advertising network to move into mobile, and rather than creating, AOL have acquired. This gives them an immediate presence in mobile and allows them to apply similar sorts of technology and measurement across all platforms. This means one sales point to buy a campaign reaching across traditional networks and also mobile, a perfect solution.

Now seems right in terms of timing as well. Google has just acquired Doubleclick who have been building a strong mobile ad platform, so AOL needed to react. The mobile market in the US has crept from $421mn in 06 and is predicted to hit $4.7bn in 2011.

Mobile advertising is already a strong player in the more developed mobile markets of Europe, S.Korea and Japan, but from my experience there is not a great network so far who has really capitalized on mobile advertising.

Matt Bamford-Bowes