A 17 year-old high school drop out tackles mobile advertising with MobFox

The great thing about building successful software applications is that you don’t really need a proper education, but rather a good understanding of markets and obviously knowledge of how to program.

Meet Julian Zehetmayer, who in 2010 as a 17-year old high school drop out quietly launched MobFox, a mobile advertising network, much like Admob, but with a simple and clear USP: Higher CPCs/CPMs for developers working with MobFox as their mobile advertising solution of choice. The startup, which is currently self funded and according to the founder “only interested if the deal is interesting enough”, is already being used in around 1,500 applications worldwide, with several renowned apps such as Friendly for Facebook or IM+ making money through MobFox’s ad engine.

In comparison, when Google bought Admob they served ads to around 15,000 apps and had raised up to $15.7 million in Series C funding and had a significantly larger sales and development force. These are quite interesting stats given the fact that MobFox is currently a one-person company living off its own revenues, which are reportedly to be somewhere around €10,000 daily.

The startup has not only attracted publishers through a higher CPC/CPM promise (which obviously every ad offering does) but with some intuitive and smart features, such as eCPMonitor, which allows developers to adjust a minimum CPC for their ads. If they don’t perform well enough, the developer may chose from a variety of backup services such as Admob, which enables one to fill the rest of the inventory.

Another function lets developers serve a particular set of ads that they can upload and manage through the system, making it effectively a full mobile ad server as well. There are SDKs also available for all major mobile operating systems (except for Symbian) and among the advertisers using the platform are mobile giants such as Buongiorno or YOC.