I expected mobile advertising to be fairly big at this year’s CTIA, but I didn’t realize that it would be one of the center-stage topics of the show. Everyone from publishers to platform providers to carriers were out to learn all they could about the offerings, and how they differ from each other. But the best part was how much excitement publishers felt for having another monetization method for their content. It’s been a long time coming.
One thing I was worried about was the overlap of all the companies in this space. But in all honesty, everyone seems to be taking a different approach, all of them valid. I discuss more about how AdHoc differs below.
Now this isn’t to say everyone is jumping in feet first. The CPC rate and clickthrough numbers being reported by the players in our area still vary widely from each other, and the true revenue streams that these different services offer have yet to be quantified or validated. But everyone is in agreement – mobile advertising is the engine that will push mobile innovation forward.
Yeah, I work for a mobile advertising technology company and this is starting to sound like a fluff piece. So let me just go through some of the common questions we’ve fielded over the past few days:
Q: What are the click-through rates being reported?
A: In the tests with our initial developers, we’ve been getting 3.8 – 5.8 percent click-throughs. This is for WAP, not applications. The application developers have longer release cycles, so we’ll certainly be collecting more data as they are released and start pumping real ads to real users.
Q: What are the normal CPC numbers you’ve seen advertisers agree to?
A: $0.10 to $0.25 has been the range that our early-partner advertisers have been willing to pay.
Q: How much will we make?
A: You get 60% (as a standard baseline) of the CPC on each click. If you bring your own advertisers or have something more to offer, we can negotiate.
Q: What is your business model?
A: We have focused most of our effort on creating a solid middleware solution with a programmatic web service API that we can whitelabel to carriers, major media companies, etc. We are also building an open-market solution around this middleware to create our own third-party mobile ad service – and we’re already seeing around 2 million page views per month and are growing.
Q: What ads will I get? Can I pick?
A1: Our system has a detailed targeting mechanism that automatically helps narrow down the ads best suited for your request. You can select some defaults for your app, but you can target each request for an ad differently at runtime. If, for example, you have a social networking application with different chat rooms, you can request different types of ads (eg. food, news, music, etc.) depending on which chat room the user is in. There’s a ton of targeting parameters you can use, and we’re expanding the system heavily in future cycles to take advantage of the mobile device even more.
A2: You can bring your own advertisers and just use those ads. You can pull from our public sets of ads, or a combination of both. You can blacklist certain public ads as well. Basically, you can create your own ad ecosystem, specially targeted to your application.
Q: Do I need to use a library in our app? Do I need to use javascript in my WAP site?
A: No way. We’re a simple REST XML or JSON web service. Integration is fast and easy and you determine how you want to present the ads and register the clicks.
Q: I don’t want to make network calls from my app. I already talk to my own server and don’t want to talk to yours from the phone too.
A: That’s not a question. But I kid, I kid. Your server can talk to ours and pull the ads there. Cache as many as you want and then send them out to your clients with the rest of your data. Register clicks to us from your server when your clients report back.
Q: What about reporting and control? Can I make this a part of my infrastructure or do I have to go through a web interface?
A: Our first level of control is a REST XML interface for all administration and reporting tasks. You can do everything you need through that. Our web interface that layers over that web service is coming in the next month or so, and both will be available to publishers, advertisers, and infrastructure partners.
Q: I want the ability to manage and serve ads in my platform or infrastructure. I don’t want a third-party service, can I bring it in house?
A: Yes. The core system is designed to be a middleware component, and we can license the platform to you for use with your own service.
Q: Are the carriers cool with this?
A: The short answer is “probably”. However each carrier is addressing/experimenting with the mobile advertising opportunities differently. As an example, one of the application publishers we are working with has gotten approval from Verizon to include ads in their app.
Q: How do you differ from (insert other mobile advertising company here)
A: Depends on the company. We have our little comparison sheet, but the general answer is that our the ability to become a part of your infrastructure through a straightforward web services API, our focus on apps (in addition to WAP and SMS), and the ability to give publishers much more integration choice are our major differentiators.
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