If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it eleventy-four times. Mobile advertising is hot right now. U.S. mobile ad revenues, for example, are expected to hit $2.8 billion by 2015, says BIA/Kelsey, thanks largely to the the fact that 76.8 million Americans now own a smartphone.
This is all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that app developers still face a lot hurdles when it comes to marketing and monetizing their apps. With 81 percent of apps on iOS, for example, now being downloaded for free, many developers rely on mobile advertising and in-app purchases to monetize their apps. In concert with the growing market, mobile ad networks are now popping up fire and wide. One of the more notable networks being Google’s AdMob, but there are many younger competitors in the space, including a cool platform we covered yesterday, called Adlibrium.
But who’s thinking about the developers? That’s what Israeli startup and mobile ad mediation platform inneractive is asking. Founded in 2007 (with offices now in Palo Alto), inneractive aims to help solve some of the friction developers encounter in monetizing their apps by giving them the tools to maximize revenue and serve targeted, relevant ads to their users that increase CTR, eCPM, and global fill rates.
The startup is currently working with 100 ad partners in over 200 countries, including some of the big ad networks like AdMob, BuzzCity, and Jumptap, among others. With local agencies in these countries, inneractive hopes to ensure that a person in Italy, for example, will see Italian ads, and a person in Israel will see Hebrew ads, etc.
Essentially, inneractive integrates its 100 partner networks and ad agencies into one cross platform SDK so that enables developers to take advantage of relevant ads within their apps, which as a matter of course, tends to improve CTR and those other important mobile advertising stats. Inneractive runs campaigns and ads based on the location, platform, and content of the developer’s app, too, in order to provide the user with more targeted ads.
According to inneractive Head of Marketing Hillel Fuld, the startup is currently seeing a 95 percent global fill rate, 99 percent in the U.S., click-through-rates as high as 3 percent, depending on the platform and app, and “triple the industry average” in eCPM (Android and WP7 is about $1.3 on average, with Ovi $2.5 on average), all of which has seen the startup’s revenue grow six-fold from 2010 to 2011.
Of course, serving relevant ads means squat if developers can only use an ad optimization platform on one mobile OS. Today, inneractive is officially announcing the completion of its portfolio of SDKs. The coolest part about this for developers is that there’s only one line of code. So, in about 10 to 15 seconds (and I’ve seen this in action), a developer can have their app integrated with inneractive’s SDK. What’s more, these one-liners are available for Windows, iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. Inneractive also offers SDKs for Bada, J2mE, Symbian, and Flash, though without one-line implementation.
The Android SDK was the last piece of the puzzle, and it launches officially today. The company has been beta testing the Android SDK, and according to Fuld, the company has seen ad revenue, impressions, and clicks growing by about 30 percent over the past two weeks.
Seeing as its free to use and revenue sharing for developers is 65 percent to 35 percent (with the 65 percent going to the developer), and the SDK implementation is a breeze, inneractive is offering a nifty little developer-friendly mobile platform that’s worth checking out.
Interested parties can sign up and download the portfolio of SDKs here.