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.
The company first launched in November 2010. At the time, CEO Shawn Scheuer said that no one had effectively brought the “performance-based” ad model into the mobile world. Even now, Scheuer says most ad companies are interested in paying publishers based on impressions or clicks, rather than the form submissions, inbound phone calls, and mobile app installs that Moolah tracks and pays for. So Moolah’s approach is bringing more direct-response marketers into the mobile world — 50 advertisers so far.
Last fall, Moolah tried to improve its ads with the launch of SmartMoolah, which gathers more data about user behavior after the click. Since then, publishers have seen significantly higher payments, and are now willing to hand more of their inventory over to Moolah, Scheuer says.
He also revealed that 65 percent of Moolah’s ads get served on Android devices, compared to 19 percent on feature phones and a lowly 14 percent for iOS devices. That’s because certain products or services do better on certain carriers or devices, and it’s possible to target ads at that level on Android by not iPhone.
“We’re a small team, so we have to focus on where see the highest response rates, and right now that’s Android,” Scheuer says. “Apple has been clamping down on the user ID tracking, and they’re kind of spooking a lot of people about that. That’s really hurt advertising on the iPhone.”