Ad tech companies are buying gaming companies, and gaming companies, like Zynga, are buying ad tech. In May, Zynga, maker of FarmVille and Words With Friends, spent $250 million to acquire in-app monetization platform Chartboost. But don’t call Zynga a “content fortress,” says Scott Koenigsberg, Zynga’s chief product officer.
AppLovin is in the process of fully integrating MAX and MoPub, which AppLovin bought from Twitter in October for around $1 billion. Since the acquisition, the number of apps monetizing with MAX, AppLovin’s in-app bidding software is up by more than 60%,, according to CEO Adam Foroughi.
Unified auctions yield better results for app publishers than waterfall-based mediation … right? In theory. But developers aren’t making as much money as they could from in-app auctions despite the promise of increased average revenue per daily user. In-app auctions generate better CPMs for publishers because advertisers can compete for impressions in real time … […]
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 […]
Mobile app advertisers have been slower than their web counterparts to embrace programmatic-style RTB auctions. That’s starting to change as more app publishers test in-app bidding and see significant lifts in ARPDAU (average revenue per daily user). “Publishers are pushing their ad networks to get into bidding, and we’re beginning to see a snowball effect,” […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
