Google has said that it will pilot app promotions on the Play Store, essentially bringing advertising to a platform that it was only monetizing with paid transactions earlier. Whether Search, YouTube or the Android business, Google businesses have always been about creating fragmentation in the market, and monetizing its aggregation. With the Android business, it was essentially monetizing earlier via paid transactions on the Play Store, and allowing the integration of AdMob within apps. Ads more core to Google's business than transactions Paid search results is more core to Google's traditional AdWords business, and while the company says it is merely piloting sponsored results, we believe it will have an immediate impact: developers are likely to be queuing up for it. On Google's conference call last quarter, the company had said that it now views mobile as a part of a users behavior: "people are using screen interchangeably, simultaneously throughout the day. And we really think about the user and the context rather than a particular form factor or device." Google has the fragmentation in Apps business: the company says it reaches more than a billion people on Android devices in more than 190 countries, and paid over $7 billion to developers distributing apps and games on Google Play. It's not clear what kind of ad formats will be introduced, but with Google, you can expect ads to be of a contextual nature, and perhaps even retargeting. Google says that a pilot group of advertisers are already running Google search…
