Berlin-based mobile ad platform Fyber wants to help developers get a better handle on pre-caching, the practice of pre-loading video ad content to reduce load times and ad-serving latency.
The company announced Monday that it’ll be releasing a tool within the next few weeks that enables developers to exercise more control over the pre-caching process.
App developers often find a Catch-22 when monetizing vs. optimizing the user experience. While good UX requires reducing ad-serving latency, pre-caching eats up users’ data plans and memory and drains the battery.
“But if you don’t support pre-caching at all, you might see a spinning wheel,” said Janis Zech, CRO and co-founder of Fyber, whose clients include Glu Mobile, FT Games and TextMe. “That’s not a good experience, but it can also harm a developer’s KPIs.”
Most developers work with multiple ad networks and a mediation partner, which means their apps pre-cache numerous ads a user won’t see to ensure they’re ready to load on the off chance they’re shown. That’s an annoyance for users who aren’t on Wi-Fi and it leads to developers’ abiding bugbears – an uninstall followed by bad app store reviews.
Fyber’s tool lets developers select how many ad networks to initialize when a user opens their app. Fyber automatically optimizes which ones will pre-cache ads based on their relevance to the user, likely performance and highest eCPM.
“It’s really just another form of optimization,” Zech said.
Founded in 2009, Fyber, which has a headcount just shy of 300, rebranded from SponsorPay in July 2014 when it shifted focus from being primarily a mobile ad network to a full-stack supply-side platform. To that end, Fyber bought German ad server and SSP Falk Realtime in April for €10.75 million (roughly US$11 million).
Fyber, which claims to serve around 320 million active users, is in the process of integrating Falk’s ad server into its RTB exchange, an ongoing process that Zech said he expects to be complete by Q4.
In October, Fyber was acquired by German media company RNTS Media for $190 million, where it operates as an independent subsidiary. Fyber has received five rounds of funding to date, totaling $9.6 million.
