Millennial Media today is going to announce an acquisition today of real time analytics firm TapMetrics. A source today sent us an advance copy of the press release due to hit the wires this morning. Today’s acquisition is just another in a long line of mergers, acquisitions and partnerships to fundamentally alter the shape of the mobile monetization world in recent weeks.

You could say that the clues things would heat up just after last summer when AdMob purchased rival AdWhirl, but the latest round of M&A really kicked off when Google acquired AdMob for $750 Million in stock (and subsequently purchased Gizmo5 to merge into it’s Google Voice platform). A few days later, Millennial Media secured their $16M C funding round and a few short months later, Quattro was acquired by Apple for $280 million. And then, just this month, mobile monetization firm Mobclix announced an exclusive deal with Nielsen to dive deeper on their mobile data.

This pace of M&A might be on the right side of the bell-curve, since almost every major player but Millennial has been snapped up, but don’t think that means the end of interesting business deals in this sector.  Millennial is signaling that they want to stay independent and continue their acquisition strategy alongside their existing business:

Michael Avon, CFO at Millennial Media: “We are acquiring TapMetrics, because the company shares our approach to serve the needs of developers, regardless of mobile platform.  In addition, TapMetrics’ data and analytics capabilities complement our company’s own focus and development plans.  We continue to actively evaluate other potential acquisitions to further expand our business.”

In the context of the industry, Millennial Media has always been more forthcoming with their statistical data than most of the other companies in this space (particularly with the monthly “SMART reports,” but what today’s acquisition will show is that they’re capable of continuing to push the boundaries of their service offerings in the face of competition from the likes of Google, Apple, and Yahoo as well as smaller players like Mobclix. Amongst the other interesting features that sound standard with most analytics packages (device type, ratings, version adoption, et. al), one in particular leapt out at me: real time stat monitoring.

One of the most valuable things for skyrocketing our community’s growth at SiliconANGLE has been the implementation of Woopra. With traditional metrics packages, the update cycle is generally twenty four hours, which immensely slows the cycle of trial and error in content development strategy.  With real time metrics, changes can be made to apps that nearly constantly improve the experience and performance in ways not necessarily related to monetization.

2010 is Not the Year of Mobile

We’ve followed closely the mobile ad sector in general, and early partner and sponsor to SiliconANGLE Millennial Media in particular for quite some time. We agree with Mack’s assessment from earlier this year, in which she certified 2009 as “the year of mobile.”  Personally, it reminds me a great deal of the years 2007-2008 for Web 2.0 and social networking.

Watching the crossover of this once nascent field to where it is now has been a bit like Deja Vu.  In late 2007, when Art Lindsey and I did a daily tech podcast, it seems that each day we talked about a new acquisition, funding round or exit of one variety or another. They were heady days that extended on into September of 2008, when the business side of things cooled a bit, but adoption heated up considerably.

If you look at the progression of mobile monetization, you’ll see a lot of parallels.  2008 was a great era of the new industry taking shape, with AdMob, Millennial, Quatro all starting up or taking center stage on equal or better footing than the pre-existing Yahoo and Google. They were both years of explosive growth in terms of the apps in both of those spaces. They were both years when the indies (Twitter and Facebook) were validated against the major players on equal footing with the big boys (Goog, MS, Yahoo).

History Lessons? Why?

Well, I think we can draw a few lessons from the past here, although the metaphor does break down a bit.  For instance, I don’t expect to see the bottom fall out of the economy in general September of 2010 like we saw in 2008.  On the other hand, there are looming disruptive factors on the horizon that could reshape again in 2010 what we’ve come to know to be true in 2008 and 2009 for mobile monetization.

For instance, Apple, which controls an influential share of the device marketshare, is subject to change advertising policies at a whim.  It isn’t particularly likely or rumored to happen, but Apple makes moves that benefit Apple, and you can never rule anything out. Flipping the other way, Apple’s introduction of the iPad could introduce mobile monetization to a whole new class of users, further expanding the bubble, inventory, and engaged user base.

There are also certain factors in the social media world that are shaping the potential future of mobile monetization. Services like Gowalla, Google Buzz, Yelp and Foursquare all add the location based and augmented reality aspects to the advertising mix that weren’t there a year ago and weren’t commercially viable this year.

Similarly, WiMax and LTE providers like Clear show the potential to obliterate the mobile markets as we know it with the introduction of ultra-cheap mobile broadband (for the cost of four months service on AT&T, you get a computer and six months of service on Clear, for instance).

Aside from the Crystal-Ball Gazing, Market Dynamics are Important

There’s no doubt that in the Web 2.0 world, having strong independent market innovators has what’s revolutionized our online experience.  MySpace, Twitter and Facebook have been around for literally eons in Internet years, and only now (kicking and screaming) has Google truly been drug to the world of real time updates with its search engine and new entrant Buzz (as has rival Microsoft in Bing).

Having an independent at the helm of innovation is historically important. Millennial hopes to be that and moves like the one today, should they continue, will prove that they continue to be market leader not in raw numbers but also in agenda-setting.