Namo Media Upgrades Its Native Ad Platform With Ad Carousels

Native ad startup Namo Media has found a way to pack more ads into the content streams of its publishers.

The company is launching version 3.0 of its software development kit, and co-founder and CEO Gabor Cselle said the biggest change is the addition of a carousel for ads. So instead of just seeing one ad at a time, users can now swipe horizontally to see more. Apparently Namo is using publisher data to optimize those ads so that the ones each user is most likely to interact with will show up first.

As with the initial Namo ads, the point here isn’t to develop a new ad format but to make it easy for publishers to incorporate existing formats (specifically, ad formats that blend into app news feeds). In fact, Cselle has spoken about bringing Facebook’s model to outside publishers, and in this case he said Namo’s publishers were pointing out that Facebook offers native ads in carousels.

Cselle argued that this approach will lead to higher CPMs (the amount paid per thousand impressions) for publishers, while for users, less of the content stream is taken up by ads.

The new SDK also includes better scrolling performance and ad caching, support for “swipe to refresh”-style apps, and improved targeting, he said.