Google and Apple have very different business models where mobile is concerned. Apple makes their money selling hardware. Google makes their money displaying ads. Apple can change more for their hardware if it is exclusive to them. Google makes more money if they can expand their reach. This is a lesson that Apple is well-aware of.

The latest from Bloomberg is that iAds are selling at steep discounts to what they were at launch. We talking 50 to 70% off. Everyone agrees that advertisers are not interested in high costs, just results. iAds is also at a disadvantage in that they only target Apple devices. Google does not care if its ads are displayed on its Android platform or Apple’s iOS or Blackberry or anywhere else. It just cares about the quality of the ad and the user’s interaction. This different attitude puts Google more in line with the advertiser.

Apple iAds can certainly come back, as long as the customer come first.

More info from mobile developers on the ad revenues associated with iAds and AdMob.  All in all, the jury seems to be on the side of free apps. But will it last?

It is always great to get numbers from the big players on how their Internet video deployments are going. And one of the biggest was undoubtably NBC’s Internet Olympic portal.

After paying $900 million for the exclusive rights, they claim to have sold $1 billion in advertising. Not bad considering no one was even sure that people would watch the Olympics on the Internet.

But watch they did. Over 6.5 million unique visitors to be exact. Which translates into 36 million page views, 826K mobile video views and 300k text or multimedia alerts over 17 days.

That translates into $153 per person and $27 per page view, assuming all the advertising was just on the Internet pages. Silly assumption, of course. But if this test of the viability of the Internet could be profitable, just wait until the next one.

Today I attended the Straight from the Gut Conference held by TIE. This event was sold out, and no tickets were available for walk-ins.

It was a great intro to the Internet industry and a great place to get the latest feelings from the VCs on the current state of venture capital. From the point of view of many entrepeneurs and VCs, this is actually a good time to gauge the quality of the VC firms. The general agreement is that the quality VCs will stay with their selected companies during this economic downturn and the marginal ones will close up shop and get very defensive. An overly defensive fund will end up missing some great companies if they do not continue to invest. After all, good companies are always being created regardless of the economic cycle.

The most interesting part of the show for me was the advertising panel. The people on this panel had real world experience in online advertising including numbers for ad revenues and what new sites that are depending on advertising will need to be successful. One number that I thought that was really interesting is that the CPM (cost per 1000 impressions) for general web sites has dropped to $0.50. The last that I heard, I thought that social networks and their poor advertising connections were selling for $1-3 per CPM.

Great blog post by Will Richmond on how much CPM the Hulu online video network might be making off of its premium content. He estimates that Hulu is able to charge about $30-$60 CPM. He also estimates that the online shows of Heroes is able to generate around $0.50 - $0.75 /  user / episode. And that is with just about 1 1/2 minutes of ads per show compared to the 20 minutes of ads per show that you currently see on TV.