Google LLC is extending its digital advertising business into a new, and highly lucrative, corner of the online world: mobile games.

The technology giant kicked off the push today by announcing a partnership with Unity Technologies Inc., the maker of the industry’s top mobile game engine. Unity claims that titles powered by its software racked up 24 billion downloads over the past year. Overall, 9 billion minutes are spent playing Unity-powered games every day.

The broader market is faring well too. According to a 2017 study that Google conducted with Newzoo, a market intelligence provider focused on the gaming industry, mobile titles brought in revenues of $50.4 billion last year. Advertising currently accounts for a fairly small portion of total sales, which Google hopes to change through the new Unity partnership.

Today’s announcement is the culmination of a multiyear collaboration between the companies. The alliance saw Google work with Unity to integrate its AdMob mobile advertising platform into the latter’s game engine. Ads will be served up by the search giant’s Universal App Campaigns system, which uses machine learning to optimize brands’ content.

The partnership will enable Google to reach users not only on Android but also iOS. Moreover, it could give the search giant a new edge in the augmented and virtual reality market. On top of having a dominant position in the mobile segment, Unity claims that its platform powers two thirds of AR projects as well a significant portion of VR applications.

The companies have seen some promising early results. According to internal Unity data,  87 percent of players who were served up video ads as part of the new ad partnership completed watching them.

The alliance’s announcement comes a few months after the companies unveiled a separate collaboration focused on infrastructure. Under the agreement, Google and Unity will release a set of tools for running backend game servers on the search giant’s cloud platform. They also have plans to launch an open-source project for simplifying the development of multiplayer titles.

Suhail Dutta, vice president of cloud services at Unity, discussed the company’s work with Google during a recent interview on SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE studio:

Photo: Google