Mobile advertising took off in 2011, as tablets went mainstream and it seemed as if half of the world woke out of a daze to find they were holding some sort of Apple device. Meanwhile, advertisers and developers are increasingly relying on mobile and in-app advertising to boost revenues as consumers become more comfortable with being served ads while on the go.
The mobile app community needs to monetize via ads, which is why San Francisco-based startup, Chartboost, launched its direct-deals advertising marketplace for mobile gaming in May of last year. → Read More
Mobile ad startup Mojiva is the latest startup to start throwing around the word “billion” in its press releases. The company says it now reaches one billion unique devices each month.
Of those devices, about 224 million are in the United States, Mojiva says. The United Kingdom, Germany, and Italy, account for 33 million, 10.6 million, and 8.7 million devices, respectively. Overall, Mojiva says it’s serving 45 billion ad requests in 190 countries.(When mobile ad network Millennial Media filed for an IPO last month, it said it reached 200 million unique users worldwide and claimed 40 billion ad impressions per month.) → Read More
It looks like publishers and advertisers are warming to mobile ad startup Moolah Media. The company says that in 2011, it generated 7 million leads for its advertisers — and 1.9 million of those leads (27 percent of the year’s total) came in December.
Also in December, Moolah says its ads reached 45 million Americans. And interest in the company is growing — Moolah projects that traffic to its website will triple this month, as pictured in the chart above. → Read More
How much does Google make in advertising from mobile? Cowen analyst Jim Friedland estimates that Google is generating $7 per year from each smartphone (and tablet). This includes both search and display advertising in mobile apps on both Android and iOS (iPhones and iPads). Thanks to the rapid growth in smart mobile devices from an estimated 509 million last year to nearly double that in 2012 to an estimated 914 million, Google’s mobile ad revenues are expected to more than double from an estimated $2.5 billion last year to $5.8 billion in 2012 (see chart).
Buying mobile ads across different apps and mobile sites is a highly inefficient process today. There are dozens of ad formats, about 85 percent of mobile ad inventory goes unsold, and it is difficult for advertisers to reach the scale they require. Mobile ads are ripe for a marketplace to make it more efficient, but publishers are wary of ad marketplaces, having seen how they pushed down average prices per impression on the desktop web. Today, Medialets is launching a private marketplace for mobile ads which attempts to address the problems of both mobile publishers and advertisers in a unique way.
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It’s the motion in the ocean that counts, right? Wrong. Well, at least that’s how it looks when it comes to mobile advertising. (Look out, inneractive infographic below!) If you take Google at its word, then 2011 has been the year of the tablet. Or in their words, this year tablets “went mainstream”. Sure, Google would say that, as the creator of a rapidly-propagating mobile OS, right? Well, with total number of tablets sold expected to get close to 60 million by the end of the year, I think we may be able to give them the benefit of the doubt. → Read More
Social gaming network PapayaMobile and the value exchange-based mobile ad network Tapjoy are today announcing a partnership that will combine the power of their two communities to help Android users better discover new mobile games. The jointly developed product will be called “Social Marketplace” and it will serve to recommend new games to mobile users based on their popularity among a user’s Papaya friends. In turn, developers will be able to better target consumers with more relevant ads, which means increased opportunity for engagement and monetization.
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Mobile advertising as you’ve likely heard, is hott right now. (With two “t’s”, yes.) According to comScore, mobile advertising spend is projected to hit $2.5 billion by 2014, with $2.7 billion projected in mobile ad revenues for this year and $6.6 billion by 2016.
What’s more, in August, 84.5 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones, and that number continues to grow… → Read More
With U.S. mobile ad revenues expected to hit $2.8 billion by 2015, according to BIA/Kelsey, it’s becoming pretty clear that mobile advertising is growing like gangbusters. This is largely thanks to the rising ubiquity of smartphones, as comScore showed in its May report, which included the eye-grabbing fact that 76.8 million Americans now own a smartphone.
Of course, the big players in mobile OSes, Android, iOS, RIM, Symbian, and Windows, continue to duke it out for market share, with Android currently leading the way. However, the most intense battle has been set between Android and iOS, and thanks to a nifty infographic from inneractive, the mobile ad mediation platform, we have a peek into which of the two is winning the battle over mobile advertising. → Read More
It used to be that all a marketer needed to know was your zipcode, and they could infer your income range and a whole host of other demographic data about you. But with everyone now using mobile phones that can be targeted down to exact GPS coordinates at different times of the day, areas bounded by zipcodes seem vast in comparison. Imagine if instead marketers could break up the world into 100 million different tiles, each one about the size of a city block, and infer everything from what types of people are likely to be found in that tile at any given time. That’s basically what mobile advertising data startup PlaceIQ is setting out to do.
Mobile advertising inventory still goes largely unfilled because the relevance and targeting isn’t that good. PlaceIQ sifts through tons of data about locations to give marketers a mini-zipcode-like profile of each block. The data comes from both open sources and commercial data sets, including place data, retail data, government data, event data, photo data, social data, and, crime data. This goes well beyond Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, but the company says it doesn’t use any personally identifiable information. Rather, it is making assumptions based on the contextual cues of a person’s location and time of day. → Read More
Why is eBay buying Where.com? It’s all about trying to link mobile ads directly to payments. Where will fall under PayPal. The geo-location service and mobile advertising company already has millions of active users across many mobile platforms (it is stronger on Android than on the iPhone). Where serves up both recommendations for nearby places to places to eat, drink, play, or shop and geo-targeted ads. Its WhereAds run across more than 350 mobile apps and publishers, and reach 50 million people with 3 billion impressions a month.
A few months ago, I had a pretty in-depth conversation with Where CEO Walter Doyle. He hinted at the direction he wanted to take Where. “The promise of mobile is on our doorstep,” he told me. The ultimate goal is to close the loop “from intent to purchase,” he said. “Whether you are searching, or you get deals or relevant display ads that drives you to a product or opportunity.” To do that, Where needs to offer local merchants “reach, relevancy, and redemption.” It’s got reach with its WhereAds, and is working on relevancy with its mobile recommendations. And now it can solve the redemptions challenge with PayPal. “Advertising of the future is really participating in the commercial event,” Doyle told me. “We make money when you make money. We want to participate in that on mobile because that is where commerce will occur.” → Read More
Brands and businesses are increasingly setting up Facebook Fan pages, which acts as their social homepage on Facebook where they can interact with customers and hopefully find new ones. These Fan pages can be customized with all sorts of tabs and apps. A new app launching today called TextualAds, in the same space as Textopoly, lets marketers ask for their fans’ phone numbers and send them targeted text-messages.
It is SMS marketing meets Facebook. TextualAds may be the first app to use Facebook profile and demographic data to target SMS ads. The SMS messages can be targeted to fans (who opt-in) based on their age, gender, country, city, or exact geo-location. A nightclub or bar could send out free drinks coupons to women under 30, for instance, who are fans of that bar. Or It could send an SMS message to any fan who happens to be walking in the vicinity. A spa having a slow weekend could entice women customers to “Bring in three friends and get 25% off.” → Read More
Google’s mobile ads are becoming more location-aware. Today, Google is introducing mobile display ads for both the iPhone and Android phones which can be geo-targeted. Advertisers will be able to check a “location extension for display” box and their ads will become geo-enabled when viewed in mobile browsers or apps. A little double-arrow will open up the ad and show the business pinned on map with two big blue buttons to get directions or call the business. Google will only charge for calls or clicks.
Google already offers so-called “location extension” ads for mobile search, but this is the first time it is expanding the concept to mobile display ads. Google says that mobile ads that offer a location generally see an average 8 percent increase in click-through rates over plain-vanilla mobile ads, and click-to-call mobile ads see a 6 percent increase in clicks. → Read More
Mobile advertising is currently a billion dollar market and we’ve witnessed tech giants like Google and Apple move into the space with the acquisitions of mobile ad networks AdMob and Quattro Wireless, respectively. AdMob is now part of Google’s mobile advertising business and Apple is using Quattro to power its new ad format, iAds. But there is another player that has silently been growing its business under the radar to become a dominant network in mobile advertising: Millennial Media. Currently, Millenial has the largest U.S. reach out of all the networks in terms of audience size according to Nielsen; with ads reaching 63 million of a total of 77 million mobile web users in the U.S., or 81% of the U.S. mobile web.
Despite being one of the “big three” in the still-small mobile ad space, Millennial is relatively unknown, while its competitors have seen prominent coverage in the media. Besides its monthly reports on mobile ad traffic, Millennial has avoided some of the drama that has been taking place in the industry. I caught up with the company’s CEO and co-founder Paul Palmieri to talk about how Millennial catapulted from a bootstrapped Baltimore-based startup to the largest independent mobile advertising company. → Read More
For anyone still wondering whether Apple plans to give its new iAds a competitive advantage over other mobile ad networks on the iPhone and iPad, just take a look at the slide above. It was attached to an email sent to an app developer from a Quattro Wireless sales rep which I obtained (Quattro is Apple’s recently purchased mobile ad network). The email starts off:
We’re excited to announce a brand new program launching this month called ViP (Verification of iTunes Purchase).
The VIP program is aimed at app developers who use iPhone ads to drive downloads and purchases of their own apps. It will tie the ad directly into purchasing data from iTunes, letting app developers measure the conversion rate of ad impressions to downloads. → Read More
As geo social networks gain some traction, we are beginning to see novel forms of marketing and advertisements triggered by people’s location. On Foursquare, for instance, you can get a discount if you check into a restaurant or even get a free meal if you become the mayor. GowallaIncase messenger bags, computer backpacks, and iPhone sleeves. Collect all the badges and you get a chance to win a real Incase product. → Read More
