Google bolstered its deep linking offering on Wednesday by enabling from YouTube ads, Hotel ads, Gmail ads and ads in Discovery, which is the main section of the Google app. Previously, it had only been available in search, display and Shopping ads. The line between apps and the mobile web has been blurring for years, […]
Facebook’s Audience Network is seeing in-app bidding start to pick up some serious momentum. The number of publishers monetizing through a unified auction increased sevenfold over the past year. Half of them now earn the majority of their Audience Network revenue through programmatic bidding. “Bidding is the new normal,” said Steve Webb, global lead on […]
Apple seems poised to clamp down on the rampant, unauthorized use of its mobile ad ID, the IDFA. Earlier this week, Apple added a new screen to the user interface within App Store Connect, the portal that developers use to upload and manage the distribution of their apps. The screen, discovered in the wild and […]
Video games have proven their marketing mettle during the coronavirus crisis, with people stuck at home and live sports and TV frozen in limbo. The latest example of that trend comes from Doritos, which is teaming up with Twitch to host a series of esports tournaments over the course of the year. The Doritos Disruptor […]
Creative optimization is one of the most effective tactics that mobile growth marketers can use to boost performance. But it’s also a pain in the butt. User acquisition managers must test an enormous amount of creative assets by size, color, copy and placement type before they find those that really work for specific pockets of […]
AppLovin’s acquisition of Machine Zone last week turned heads. Shouldn’t it be MZ acquiring AppLovin? But the deal makes perfect sense when you consider that Machine Zone is only the most recent – albeit the largest – content deal for AppLovin, which has made strategic investments in mobile game studios regularly for the last two […]
AppLovin is set to snap up Machine Zone. Put another way, a mobile ad startup is acquiring one of the largest mobile gaming companies in the world. Terms of the deal, announced Thursday, were not disclosed, and the acquisition is subject to approvals. MZ’s valuation was reportedly around $6 billion in 2015. Machine Zone has […]
Affiliate marketing is one of the top sources of revenue for online travel and activities booking platform Klook, in good times and … not such good times. It’s been dark days for travel marketers during the health crisis. Delta, for example, recently told investors it expects revenue to decline 90% in the second quarter. But […]
Both Words With Friends and Zynga Poker are more than 10 years old. But players who left long ago have been returning to the titles organically in recent weeks thanks to shelter in place. And new users are coming on board too. The uptick, which only really started in earnest during the last two weeks […]
Gaming is growing like gangbusters in a socially distanced world, but it’s not immune to macroeconomic trends. Take Activision Blizzard’s mobile gaming arm, King, home to the wildly popular Candy Crush franchise. Activision Blizzard, which also owns the Call of Duty and World of Warcraft franchises, reported its Q1 earnings on Tuesday after market close. […]
Media and Games Invest (MGI), the German holding company that acquired mobile location player Verve in January, is creating a separate business unit for its ad tech assets. The new unit, announced on Tuesday, is called Verve Group, and comes along with a mini reorg. Sameer Sondhi, previously SVP and GM of global business development […]
Misinformation can spread as quickly as disease. But accurate information is power during a health crisis, said Tim Koschella, CEO and founder of Kayzen, an in-app in-housing startup based in Berlin. Koschella and his team are spearheading an initiative to circulate reliable health info through in-app ads on Android devices in developing countries, including across […]
The mobile gaming category – a more than $60 billion-a-year market – is thriving amid the brewing economic crisis. But unlike other publishers and platforms experiencing engagement spikes without the corresponding uptick in ad revenue, mobile game publishers are seeing massive boosts across the board. Nearly every metric (other than CPMs and cost per install or […]
Axios launched its first mobile app on Wednesday two weeks earlier than planned in order to take advantage of the explosion in engagement with news content during the pandemic. The news site had more than 26 million unique visits in March, a record, said Mike Berkley, chief product officer at Axios. Of that web traffic, […]
Mobile advertising platform InMobi is revising its compensation structure for employees in an effort to avoid layoffs due to economic strife related to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Effective April 2020, employees will receive a portion of their salary in the form of stock rather than cash. The stock component begins at 10% of an employee’s […]
On Tuesday, PlaceIQ announced its acquisition of Toronto-based location data and measurement company Freckle IoT. Terms were not disclosed. Foot traffic may be way down during the pandemic, but consolidation in the location data space is heating up. The day before, Foursquare revealed merger plans with location data provider Factual less than a year after […]
One thing Adam Singer learned when he was looking for a job over the past six months or so, was that Fortune 500 businesses aren’t equipped for remote workforce management. One CMO didn’t feel comfortable hiring someone in Austin, where Singer moved this year, because she’d never managed someone remotely before. A well-funded tech startup […]
First it was Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, then Facebook’s global marketing conference followed by F8 and the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Fear over spreading the coronavirus is scuppering events around the world, and rightfully so. As of Friday, there are 31 active cases of coronavirus reported in Spain, with three in Barcelona. […]
Mobile advertising IDs are probably not long for this world. Neither Apple nor Google – which is fresh off announcing its plan to kill third-party cookies in Chrome less than two years from now – has taken concrete steps to eliminate their respective device IDs as of yet, but the app ecosystem should be preparing for that […]
As the mobile app space matures and consolidates, one of its early entrants is floundering. Smaato just appointed its fourth CEO in a year after laying off 10% of its staff. Total headcount is down 20% from the beginning of last year, with the mobile exchange going from 240 to 190 employees. Ajitpal Pannu, who […]
It’s taken longer for real-time auctions to make their way into the app world than on the web. But programmatic is finally starting to take hold and change the way developers buy media thanks to several parallel trends. And a new crop of opportunistic startups is emerging to help developers take advantage of the shift […]
Location data is a privacy landmine. But there are still buyers out there for providers, including Media And Games Invest (MGI), the public German conglomerate that acquired mobile location company Verve earlier this week. The last few years haven’t been kind to Verve. The company experienced multiple rounds of layoffs last year and closed its […]
After running out of money and closing its doors in mid-December, video ad tech company Eyeview has a happy ending of sorts. Mobile ad platform Aki Technologies on Thursday completed its acquisition of Eyeview’s assets, which include a DSP and bidder, an ad server that ingests data signals to inform which video creative to deliver […]
AppsFlyer said Tuesday it closed a $210 million Series D round, bringing the app measurement firm’s total funding to more than $293 million since 2014. The company had previously raised a $56 million Series C in 2017. The round, which brings AppsFlyer’s valuation to $1.6 billion, was led by General Atlantic with participation from existing […]
While certain companies, like LiveRamp, run away from location data – others are running to embrace it. On Wednesday, location data company X-Mode acquired the publisher book of business and raw location data assets of Location Sciences, a UK-based third-party location data verification company that helps marketers detect location-related data quality issues in their campaigns. […]
Instagram’s US user growth rate sharply decelerated last year, from 10.1% in 2018 to 6.7% in 2019, according to eMarketer’s latest social benchmark report. EMarketer is also lowering its Instagram growth forecast, revised down from 5.4% to 4.5% in 2020, and 3.2% instead of 4.1% in 2021. The main reason why Instagram’s growth forecast in […]
The next version of the IAB Tech Lab’s open-measurement SDK (1.3) debuted on Tuesday, with support for in-app audio, more granular brand safety controls and a fix for impression counting discrepancies between vendors. But despite progress on the supply side, “very few DSPs are making use of OpenRTB signals for open measurement,” said Joe Ranzenbach, […]
The online travel search engine Kiwi.com wants to retarget users in a personalized way that’s ROI positive, said Mark Calzaverini, the company’s head of performance. “At the very least, we need to be able to identify users, make sure we’re not selling them the same thing twice,” he said. For the last year and a […]
On Monday, Activision Blizzard Media, the advertising and media arm within Activision Blizzard (parent company to juggernaut game studio King), launched King’s Council, a panel comprised of around 5,000 of its most engaged and active players across the United States and the United Kingdom. The purpose is to conduct user research and to test ad […]
Ad networks are on the outs in the desktop world, but they still have a stranglehold on the mobile app ecosystem. That’s beginning to change, though. Mobile app publishers are transacting more of their impressions through programmatic auctions in a setup that mimics header bidding on desktop. The momentum has been growing over the past […]
