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Apple taking mobile ad share from Google, Yahoo, should have 21% by year end

Apple's iAd service

is a relative newcomer to the mobile ads industry, which is probably why it's completely falling apart. No, sorry Carol, we're kidding -- Apple's service is doing extremely well, and it's already threatening established mobile advertising services like Google and Yahoo!. IDC claims that Apple will end the year with 21 percent of the market, which means that in less than a year's time, the company will have picked up almost a quarter of a rapidly growing and expanding industry. Google's share is dropping, and that's in addition to the AdMob purchase it made a while back as well. That is a phenomenal start for the iAd platform.

And in fact, IDC is convinced that Apple's gigantic entry into the ads market has actually buoyed all ships -- even smaller advertisers like JumpTap and Millenial Media are growing, and even they cite Apple's entry into the industry as a marker for their popularity. Other cellphone and mobile platform creators are looking into their own advertising as well now, when before they would have just depended on a third-party service to run things for them.

And yet despite the incredible growth, Steve Jobs is probably disappointed -- he said earlier this year that he wanted Apple to oversee half of all mobile advertising by the time 2011 started. That's unlikely to happen, but still, a quarter of a market that Apple entered less than a year ago is nothing to sniff at.