With Apple clamping down on incentivized downloads, white-label mobile app platform Appia (formerly PocketGear) has launched a new performance based advertising network for app developers to increase app downloads and only pay for results.
In case you aren’t familiar, Appia powers a white-label content and commerce platform for everyone and anyone who needs a mobile app store. The company now powers mobile app storefronts for more than 40 partners, including four of the world’s top five handset manufacturers (Samsung, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon Wireless). The bonus of using Appia’s white-label offering is that it enables its partners to deliver apps to more than 3,200 different mobile device makes and models. Via its partnerships, Appia currently powers more than 500,000 downloads a day from a catalog of 140,000 apps with projections to double by mid-2011.
Appia’s ad network allows developers to access a pay-per-download service that allows developers to promote their apps by targeting ads by country and platform (Android, iOS, Java, Symbian, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, and Palm). Developers only pay for actual downloads of their apps.
Developers will now be able to target consumers across Appia’s distribution network, which delivered 22 million downloads in March. The network now reaches more than 200 million mobile subscribers in over 200 countries. Appia’s performance based advertising network is directly integrated into the Appia Developer Program. Once an application has been uploaded to the the Appia developer portal, the developer simply sets the bid price they want to pay per download, chooses the geographies they want to target, and select a payment method. Appia’s online reporting shows campaign activity broken down by platform, device and geography; giving developers insight into where their campaign is driving app downloads.
Prior to today’s launch, Appia’s performance based advertising service has been in private beta since February but has already delivered high value sponsored downloads to trial partners including Flirtomatic and Blue Lion.
While Appia’s app platform doesn’t have the same scale as the Apple App Store, it certainly is an outlet for developers to advertise and profit. And the company’s reach is steadily increasing. Appia recently announced partnerships with Opera Software, to power the Opera Mobile Store for more than 100 million users, as well as with Telcel, Mexico’s largest operator, to power the Ideas Appstore for Telcel’s 64 million subscribers. Incentivized downloads have become a big business, and it should be interesting if developers expand to Appia’s platform to capitalize on this.