Months After Taking On A New Name And Biz Model, The Mobile Majority Reports A $50M Revenue Run Rate

Six months ago, mobile advertising startup PaeDae changed its name to The Mobile Majority, adjusted its business model, and raised some extra money. Now founder and CEO Rob Emrich is saying that the move has paid off, with the company hitting a $50 million revenue run rate in November.

When I wrote about PaeDae last year, it had built a mobile rewards network and was looking to expand into other forms of mobile advertising. However, Emrich said that as PaeDae expanded, “We experienced many of the problems with mobile advertising at scale.”

“Most things started to break over time,” he added. “What we realized was that along the supply chain, there’s no trust between companies; nobody knows what they’re buying or selling.”

To solve that problem, the company built AdSynergy, which Emrich calls “the first vertically integrated mobile advertising platform.” What does that actually mean? Well, he said the platform should offer everything that the mobile advertiser needs, including ad targeting, optimization, tracking, fraud protection and more.

Emrich added that normally, managing these campaigns would require an advertiser to work with 5 to 15 vendors. By bringing it all under one roof, AdSynergy can reduce costs. It can also help with viewability — namely, ensuring that when an advertiser pays for an ad impression, the ad actually gets seen. Emrich said that while fraud is certainly part of the issue, there’s a broader problem with “no silver bullet.”

“Viewability is more of a problem of data and technology,” he said. “It’s almost like playing a game of telephone, and it gets worse the more vendors you need to use. In order to really diagnose what’s going on, you really need to be able to look at the entire system.”

In addition, the company says it recently had its highest single day of revenue, with $360,000 in revenue and 517 million interactive ads served. (Those are gross revenue numbers, i.e. revenue before the publishers get paid.) Headquartered in Santa Monica, The Mobile Majority says it now has five offices across the country and 50 employees.