Attracting mobile users is pricy. Attracting the right mobile users is even pricier. Cost per install in September was $1.53 on iOS and $1.88 on Android, a 24% and 87% YoY increase, respectively, according to the most recent data from Fiksu. The cost to acquire a loyal user, defined as someone who opens an app […]
Why did Time Inc. decide to partner with Etermax, the Buenos Aires-based game studio responsible for the hugely popular app Trivia Crack? a) as a native play b) as a form of content discovery c) to encourage mobile engagement d) all of the above The answer: d. “We’re quickly evolving from being a print company […]
There was a time around 2009 when you couldn’t talk about Zynga without also talking about Facebook. Back then, FarmVille, CityVille and CafeWorld were beyond ubiquitous. But Facebook wasn’t mentioned once on Tuesday during Zynga’s third-quarter earnings call. That’s partially because Facebook’s users are increasingly mobile, with 1.39 billion monthly actives out of 1.55 billion […]
Adding a different advertising partner on desktop can be as easy as adding a tag. But for the mobile web and apps, assuming such flexibility is a recipe for disaster. Since mobile is so complex, publishers must think about a slew of factors at the very beginning, when they are formulating their mobile strategy. The […]
Facebook continues to see hand-over-fist growth in its ad revenue and user base, according to Wednesday’s third-quarter earnings report, which pegged overall advertising revenue at $4.3 billion. That’s a 45% gain over Q3 2014, and 57% higher when currency fluctuations are factored in. Facebook’s user growth continues to accelerate. Since the platform’s first-ever billion-user day […]
SDK mediation is still a major headache for developers. “We constantly hear from publishers that they want full control of their inventory – they don’t want to send their inventory into a black box,” said Ajitpal Pannu, chief business officer of mobile ad exchange Smaato, which on Wednesday launched a tool designed to act as an […]
It’s nice to present a customer who has previously demonstrated a love for, say, ice cream with a coupon for a discounted cone. But it’s nicer if that offer comes on a hot day in proximity to an ice cream shop and if the payment is taken care of through a seamless integration with one’s […]
Want to track across devices? Then you’re going to have to enter the walled gardens of Google and Facebook. But the open ecosystem is working hard – and working together – to catch up. It’s in this spirit that MarketShare launched Monday a “Consortium for Cross-Device Measurement,” which for now includes Drawbridge, Crosswise, Tapad and […]
Mobile apps are way faster than the mobile web, and that’s a serious problem for publishers. “I work really hard to make the mobile web load as quickly as possible, but it still takes about five seconds,” said Free Reyes, the co-founder, editor and COO of movie site GeekTyrant. Fifty-five percent of its traffic comes […]
App developer Guy Tal isn’t interested in cold calls from mobile service providers he isn’t familiar with who want him to test their software development kit (SDK). “I get approached by companies through email and at conferences all the time and, to be honest, I really can’t be bothered,” said Tal, CEO and founder […]
The same rules in life apply to beacon advertising programs: Don’t be annoying or people are going to leave the party. “You’d just delete the app if you got seven push notifications in one place,” said Rachel Pasqua, practice lead for mobile and emerging technology at MEC Global, North America. “We’re speaking as an agent […]
The Been Choice saga seems to be coming to an unexpected conclusion – Apple is going to allow the in-app ad blocker to block in-app ads after all, including in Apple News. Just not in Facebook, Pinterest, Yahoo, Yahoo Finance, Google or any other apps that requires end to encryption, a process that prevents third parties […]
Putting the “A” in MAU or DAU is about a lot more than enabling users to rack up a bunch of points – it’s about giving those monthly or daily users a reason to be active in the first place. “Customer loyalty is at the heart of everything we do,” said Karah Sutton, marketing and […]
The mobile web is way too slow for publishers and users alike. Google, along with platform and publisher partners including Twitter, Vox, BuzzFeed, the Guardian and The Washington Post, unveiled its answer to this problem on Wednesday: the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project. “Anything less than instant shows a decline in engagement,” said Richard Gingras, head of […]
While it has become typical for industry watchers to declare that the mobile web is suffering at the expense of apps’ success, a report Monday revealed consumers use both at almost equal levels. “The New Mobile Mantra,” from WPP’s research unit, Millward Brown Digital, found that of the 30 most-visited mobile properties, browser and app […]
Deep-linking vendor Button announced the Button Marketplace on Thursday in an attempt to sustain the mobile app world without the need for digital ad dollars. “It’s an entirely different paradigm for apps,” said Michael Jaconi, Button’s co-founder and CEO. “You can’t capitalize on search and intent in this world like you did for the web.” […]
Of all the threats posed by the ad-blocking trend, perhaps the scariest scenario for publishers is that paid media placements could be filtered at the network level. Now that nightmare seems to be coming true, as Israeli ad-blocking tech company Shine has said it will integrate with wireless carrier Digicel to screen ads aimed at […]
Urban Airship is crossing the streams – but in a good way. The mobile tech company announced a solution called Urban Airship Connect on Tuesday that aims to provide advertisers with access to app data through a real-time streaming API. The solution will be generally available later in Q4. The gist? Consumers are interacting with apps […]
Google said Monday it will let marketers use their first-party CRM data to target specific users based on hashed email addresses. The product is called Customer Match. While Facebook and Twitter both enable CRM matching, that Google now allows it constitutes “a seminal shift for first-party, addressable targeting,” said Merkle’s EVP of digital strategy, Matt […]
Just because people block ads doesn’t mean they hate advertising – it means they hate bad advertising. Slow-loading, third-party tracking, battery-draining, bandwidth-bleeding, pop-upping, visually questionable and sometimes creepily relevant (but, more often than not, utterly irrelevant) advertising. But a straw poll conducted by Dean Murphy, the developer behind the iOS ad-blocker app Crystal, found that 71% of […]
Static ad content is just too old school for apps. That’s the thinking at Quixey, a company mostly known as an app search engine. On Thursday, Quixey announced the release of Deep View Cards, a technology that generates dynamic creative in-feed ad units that mimic an app’s native UI and user experience. The product, now […]
Flashtalking is on a quest to become what company CEO John Nardone calls a “single point of truth.” It’s why the NYC-based ad server decided to buy Device[9], a small cross-device recognition company located in Hamburg, Germany. The acquisition, announced Tuesday, was a mostly stock deal. Nardone declined to share the sale price. At its […]
Pandora knows sound. Now the music streaming service is experimenting with sight and motion in its quest for new users – and mobile is the central battleground. More than three-quarters of Pandora’s roughly 80 million monthly active users listen on mobile. “We want to acquire and engage high-quality listeners – aka users who actively use the app […]
Citing a guilty conscience, the developer behind the ad blocking app that shot to the top of the iOS 9 charts has pulled his creation off the App Store shelves. Marco Arment, who cofounded Tumblr and created Instapaper before dabbling in ad blocking, said he ultimately couldn’t endorse an app that blocked ads en masse. Arment’s […]
Mobile ad blocking is a disaster for the ad industry. Content blocking is not the harbinger of advertising doom that some speculate it is. So, which is it? If the adoption numbers for mobile content blocking apps the day after Apple’s iOS 9 release on Wednesday are any indication, skeptics might have to change their […]
Brands are on the constant hunt for engaged audiences. It’s why they attend upfronts for television, NewFronts for digital, future fronts for programmatic, podcast upfronts for audio – and, now, AppFronts for apps. General Electric hosted its first AppFronts on Tuesday in New York City, gathering together an audience of brands and agencies for an event […]
Just as device manufacturers want to be Apple, ecommerce shops want to be Amazon and social networks look up to Facebook, China-based WeChat is the chat application others seek to emulate. Yes, WeChat, a free app with 600 million monthly active users (100 million fewer than Facebook Messenger), enables chatting, but it’s also a platform […]
Developers are up to their ears in mobile SDKs – and they’re not going to take it anymore. The trend toward consolidated mobile solutions is real, said Omer Kaplan, deputy CEO and co-founder of app discovery platform ironSource, which has acquired mobile monetization platform Supersonic. The deal was officially announced Thursday following a leak in mid-July when […]
There’s no need to freak out, but content blocking in iOS 9 goes beyond the mobile web and in some cases will also apply to in-app advertising. And that’s because of an in-app browsing mechanism in iOS 9 called Safari View Controller. It’s basically a more streamlined version of Apple’s current webview framework that developers […]
The US market can be a tough nut to crack for an international startup. “If you’re not a US company, there are hurdles,” said Frederic Joseph, global COO and UK chief exec at French mobile retargeting company S4M. “Some people think, at least on some level, that if a company doesn’t come from the US, […]
