app monetization

CloudX, which makes AI infrastructure for app publishers, is expanding from monetization to agentic buying for user acquisition.

Following a dramatic courtship between Unity and ironSource, Unity put a ring on it. The merger closed on Monday. The purpose of the deal is to bring all of the tools developers need to create, test, launch, grow and monetize their games together under one roof.

Google released a batch of new monetization, targeting and measurement features for AdMob on Thursday, with a focus on (what else?) data privacy. “Everybody is thinking about how they can evolve in this new world,” David Mitby, Google’s senior director of product management for app ads, told AdExchanger.

Unity will merge with ironSource in an all stock transaction that values the latter at $4.4 billion. The companies expect the merger to help deliver a $1 billion run rate by the end of 2024 and $300 million in annual EBITDA synergies the year after that.

Steve Webb, the former global head of Facebook’s Audience Network, has joined Unity Technologies as VP of revenue for ads under its Operate division. Webb’s first day was June 13 and he replaces Julie Shumaker, who was elevated to SVP of revenue for Unity’s Create division in October. (Unity, which went public in September 2020, […]

TextNow, a free text, voice and video calling app, is on track to hit $100 million in revenue this year, up from $62 million in 2020. The company is profitable. Fun fact, most of that revenue comes from advertising, says Ken Willner, the company’s chief growth officer.

“The Sell Sider” is a column written by the sell side of the digital media community. Today’s column is written by Meiry Vaknin, VP of partnerships at YouAppi. After this exclusive first look for subscribers, the story will be published in full on AdExchanger.com tomorrow. The mobile gaming market is set to grow 4.4% in 2021 to […]

Rewarded video is a staple of mobile game monetization. So why isn’t rewarded audio a thing? That’s the question Amit Monheit, now the CEO and founder of in-game audio ad startup Odeeo, started asking himself last year after losing his job at a Tel Aviv-based audio content discovery platform during the height of the pandemic. […]

“Data-Driven Thinking” is written by members of the media community and contains fresh ideas on the digital revolution in media. Today’s column is written by Omer Adato, director of product at ironSource. App monetization managers have an increasingly complex job. As the market grows, so does the technology to support it, leading to an ever-growing stream […]

Zynga is buying in-app growth and mobile monetization platform Chartboost for $250 million. It’s an excellent exit for a company that’s only raised $21 million since its $2 million Series A in 2011. The deal, expected to close in the third quarter, was announced on Wednesday on Zynga’s Q1 earnings call, during which the company […]

AppLovin has struck again. Bloomberg scooped late Wednesday afternoon that AppLovin is on the cusp of acquiring mobile app attribution startup Adjust for $1 billion. The news was confirmed by AppLovin in a press release. [Read the release]. AppLovin is an app marketing platform that helps advertisers automate their user acquisition and re-engagment campaigns. Adjust, […]

Starting in Q2 2021, bidding will be the only way to buy ads in iOS apps through Facebook’s Audience Network. At that point, waterfall-based buying will no longer be supported. Facebook says the goal had always been to become a bidding-only demand source ever since in-app bidding first launched in Audience Network in 2017. But […]

The mobile ad ecosystem has changed a lot since MoPub, Twitter’s mobile ad exchange, was founded in 2010. Tech years are like dog years, and a decade might as well be a century. But the more some things change, the more they stay the same: Marketers still need some convincing to spend on mobile and […]

Jam City is jamming, despite COVID-19. The LA-based casual mobile game studio plans to hire artists, producers, data analysts and people focused on creative strategy. Gaming is one of the few verticals that’s growing during the ongoing health crisis. People started playing more games when stay-at-home orders were announced in March, and the behavior has […]

Mosaic Group, IAC’s global app division, is probably one of the biggest mobile app developers you’ve never heard of. It owns 40 utility apps, including RoboKiller, the largest spam call blocker in the United States; iTranslate, the translation app with the greatest penetration after Google Translate; and the hugely popular Daily Burn fitness app. Mosaic […]

Engagement with games is up during the pandemic, but it’s not only because people are looking for a way to kill time. Gaming can be a therapeutic exercise, said Brian Ames, president of Activision Blizzard Media, the advertising and marketing division within gaming juggernaut Activision Blizzard, which owns Call of Duty, World of Warcraft and […]

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. […]

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 […]

Game developers have a lot on their plate beyond developing games. There’s testing, marketing, monetization, ad serving, analytics, optimization, user acquisition and a heap of other commercial considerations. “But developers – they just want to make games,” said Andrew French, chief operating officer at Coda, a London-based game publishing platform founded last year to provide automated technology […]

Mike Brooks, WeatherBug’s SVP of revenue, is a mobile programmatic evangelist. “We’ve seen a huge positive impact from adopting a unified auction, and we like to be vocal about it,” Brooks said. “We talk about programmatic to anybody who will listen, because this is the way of the future.” In early 2018, the weather app, […]

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 […]

It’s a cliche to say that data is fuel but, in GasBuddy’s case, that’s literally true. The GasBuddy app, which helps drivers crowdsource information about cheap fuel prices, has access to opted-in location data from more than 15 million monthly active users. Users are more than willing to share their data, because they’re receiving a utility […]

Google added a slew of new solutions, ad formats and targeting options to its automated app ad platform and to AdMob, the company said on Wednesday. And there’s a theme: Automation and machine learning are becoming increasingly central to Google’s vision for app advertising. Advertisers can use automation to be more efficient with their user […]

Facebook is bringing playable ads, an interactive format that lets users demo a mini version of an app before downloading it, to Audience Network starting Wednesday. It’s available within rewarded video and interstitial placements. In the coming weeks, Facebook is also planning to expand access to its rewarded video unit to all publishers across the […]

MoPub released an SDK update on Tuesday that gives app publishers access to impression-level revenue data. Historically, that type of data – which lets user acquisition managers attribute revenue and lifetime value to specific users at the impression level – has been hard to come by. Most third-party ad networks haven’t been set up to […]

Scruff has a love/hate relationship with programmatic advertising. When the gay dating app, which now has more than 12 million users, first came on the scene in 2010, its monetization strategy could pretty much be summed up in one word: AdMob. But in January, the Grindr competitor decided to remove all its banner ad slots […]

Episode, a choose-your-own-adventure storytelling app, is choosing a road to revenue centered on the user experience first. Monetization is delicately balanced with the demands of UX for the interactive app, which allows users to immerse themselves in fictional narratives. “But there is a lot of revenue to be made if we can get people engaged,” […]

Kiip is giving SDK-averse apps another option to test its demand. On Thursday, the mobile rewards ad network rolled out the ability to use JavaScript tags as a lighter-weight way to serve campaigns into a publisher’s app. Early test partners include music discovery app SoundHound and The Meet Group, which operates a suite of social […]

At long last, AOL is really starting to make use of its 2015 Millennial Media acquisition. On Tuesday, Verizon-owned AOL rolled out self-serve functionality for its mobile supply-side platform, One by AOL: Mobile. It’s basically AOL’s answer to Google’s AdMob or Twitter’s MoPub. AOL beta tested the capability for several months before launch with several partners, […]

LaMusica knows its largely millennial audience likes to snack. “It’s very hard to get their attention,” said Jesus Lara, EVP of digital media at Spanish Broadcasting System, one of the largest Spanish-language radio broadcasters in the United States and owner of LaMusica, a free streaming music app aimed at Hispanic millennials. “Our strategy is to […]