Flurry Gets Into Real-Time Bidding With Launch Of Flurry Marketplace Ad Exchange For Mobile Apps

App analytics and advertising firm Flurry today announced the launch of Flurry Marketplace, its own RTB Exchange for mobile applications, which allows advertisers to bid on available ad impressions in real time. This sort of programmatic buying, already popular on the web, is just now coming into its own on mobile, and Flurry’s entrance into this space is notable because of the size of the data set it can offer advertisers.

The company now sees over 1 billion smartphones and tablets used per month from the over 300,000 applications using Flurry Analytics, a product it offers for free. By doing so, it has established a relationship with mobile app developers and publishers, pushing them towards Flurry’s other premium products, including its advertising services, user acquisition, crash reporting, and audience segmentation tools, and more.

Flurry’s new RTB Marketplace comes pre-bundled with app audience data so programmatic buyers can evaluate bid requests based on things like age, gender, device, geography, application category, and Flurry Personas, the above-mentioned audience segmentation product launched last summer. With Personas, app developers are able to identify users as being in one or more of some two dozen or so audience segments, like “sports fans,” “business travelers,” “value shoppers,” and more – data which can be used to both better customize apps to cater to users’ interests, as well as display more relevant ads.

Bundling the audience data into the RTB product will help differentiate Flurry from some of its competition, because it will allow the advertisers to reach a specific audience through a developer who can provide them that reach. The idea is that by providing better targeting abilities like this, advertisers will bid more to have their impressions shown. The product will compete with other more established players, including mobile RTBs like MoPub, Smaato, Nexage, Mobclix and many others.

Flurry Marketplace, now a part of Flurry’s data-powered, supply-side platform AppSpot, will reach over 300 million monthly unique users, and offers advertisers the ability to bid on billions of ad impressions per month, the company claims. Advertisers can transparently bid on specific apps or app categories, and filter out where ads should not run, as well.

“Despite big data advances, app publishers continue to sell inventory undervalued and blind because programmatic buyers don’t yet have a platform that overcomes publisher fragmentation and provides quality audience data in order to improve buying decisions,” Simon Khalaf, Flurry president and CEO explains. “Flurry Marketplace aggregates and enriches advertising inventory from thousands of applications with relevant, granular audience data that empowers DSPs, ATDs and networks to buy efficiently.”

Flurry also shared some other figures today, to illustrate its reach in terms of devices and app sessions, noting that it sees over 44,000 app sessions worldwide each second, and is involved in over a third of all sessions on mobile devices (phones and tablets) daily. Apps in its network are used on over 90 percent of active smartphones and tablets monthly, the company notes.

More details on Flurry Marketplace will be available on Flurry.com.