Posts Tagged ‘mobile advertising’

Mobile ad network Moolah Media says it’s all about performance

moolah mediaApple made a big splash this year with its iAd network for high-quality ads from big brands, but new mobile ad network Moolah Media says it’s already successful by aiming for advertisers who aren’t quite as high-end.

The San Francisco startup is coming out of stealth mode today, but its services have been up-and-running for a month. Chief executive Shawn Scheuer said Moolah Media has already served more than 100 million impressions and generated more than 250,000 “quality” leads for its advertisers.

“We’re not going to beat iAds on filling the first 5 percent of your inventory at $25 or $50 CPMs (payment per thousand impressions),” Scheuer said. “But we will beat other people on filling the remaining 95 percent.”

Moolah came from the founders’ own experience trying to make money from their mobile app, Scheuer said. By using AdMob (now owned by Google) and various other ad networks, they were only able to earn 25 cent CPMs “on a good day.” Then they discovered they could increase those CPMs by more than 10 times if they created their own custom ads, and now they’re making the technology they developed available on their network.

The key, Scheuer said, is a focus on a pay-per-performance model, where you’re paying for actions and not just eyeballs, coupled with greater publisher transparency. For example, he said, most major ad networks only let you target ads by phone, carrier, and a few extremely broad categories. Moolah lets you see ad performance by individual publisher, and it kicked out an early publisher that wasn’t performing. Moolah also creates special phone numbers for ads so businesses can tell when customer calls were spurred by a specific ad.

“On the fixed Web side, these ideas are not new,” he said, but they haven’t been brought effectively into the mobile world.

Moolah is self-funded and is already profitable, he added.

Tags: mobile ads, mobile advertising

Companies: Moolah Media

People: Shawn Scheuer






Video ad startup YuMe goes mobile

yume ipadYuMe, a well-funded video advertising startup, announced today that it’s bringing its technology to the mobile world.

Specifically, the Redwood City, Calif.-based company said it’s releasing two new mobile ad units, Mobile Connect and Mobile Billboard, as well as software development kits that will allow the creators of iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch apps to integrate YuMe’s ACE for Publishers ad platform. The ads can run as full-screen video, and they include buttons that can direct users to things like an advertiser’s Facebook Page or a downloadable coupon.

Nowadays, It seems like every ad company in the world is emailing me about its mobile ad units. For example, a company called mDialog announced last week that it’s introducing new interactive features to its video iPad ads. And of course Apple has launched its own iAd program.

When I asked YuMe co-founder and president Jayant Kadambi what makes his ads different, he said it’s less about specific features and more about the cross-platform advertising that YuMe can offer. Now YuMe’s 600 video publishers can also run high-quality ads on mobile devices. And advertisers can come to YuMe to purchase ad space on a website, a mobile app, and on Internet-connected TV properties. Those advertisers can build mobile-specific ads, but if they don’t want to do that, YuMe will also resize a single ad to fit different screens.

“I think everybody’s come at it from a vertical, niche-y standpoint,” Kadambi said. “It’s about the video. It’s not about the format of the video.”

YuMe has raised $46 million from Menlo Ventures, Accel Partners, BV Capital, DAG Ventures and Khosla Ventures.

Tags: iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, mobile advertising

Companies: YuMe

People: Jayant Kadambi






AdMob’s Omar Hamoui leaves Google for “personal reasons”

Omar HamouiUpdated

Omar Hamoui, founder and chief executive of Google-acquired mobile ad startup AdMob, is leaving the search giant for what the company says are personal reasons.

Only five months have passed since the acquisition finally closed, which means Hamoui spent more time (about six months) waiting for the government to approve the deal than he did at Google. Following the acquisition, Hamoui was named Google’s vice president of mobile ads.

We’ve heard that Hamoui was having health problems, which would explain such an early departure (startup executives usually lose some of the acquisition money if they don’t stay for a couple of years). [Update: Hamoui posted on Twitter that he's fine.] When I asked Google for details, the company sent the following statement:

Omar has decided to leave AdMob and Google for personal reasons. He built a fantastic business in a short period of time, and we wish him all the best. Mobile advertising — across search and display — is now a billion dollar business for Google, with AdMob a key part of that. Google is fortunate to have a great team of leaders who are driving the next phase of rapid growth and innovation across all our mobile ads products.

The AdMob acquisition was seen as a key part of Google’s strategy to move into mobile ads, just as rival Apple acquired Quattro and launched its iAds initiative — a program that Hamoui praised. While Hamoui was very much the main face of AdMob, he isn’t the only AdMob executive who joined Google. Jason Spero, who led AdMob’s business development and marketing, is now Google’s director of mobile (though like many Google titles, it’s not clear exactly what that entails).

Hamoui’s departure was first reported in TechCrunch.

Tags: mobile ads, mobile advertising

Companies: AdMob, Google

People: Jason Spero, Omar Hamoui






Placecast and O2 bring location-based ads to 1M UK residents

loreal placecastLocation-based advertising doesn’t seem to have reached a mass audience yet, but things may be changing. San Francisco startup Placecast just announced a deal that should bring its location-based ads to 1 million new users.

Placecast is partnering with O2 (owned by Telefonica) to deliver ads on the mobile carrier’s O2 More service in the United Kingdom. Previously, O2 More delivered offers based on customers’ age, gender, and interests to more than 1 million subscribers. Now it’s adding location.

The two initial advertisers in this partnership are Starbucks and L’Oreal, which have both activated “geo-fences” around their UK stores. So when an O2 More user gets close to the store, and if they’ve expressed an interest in what the stores are selling, they’ll receive a special offer on their phone via SMS or MMS.

Customer interested in food or drink who approach a Starbucks will be offered a discount on Starbucks instant coffee. Customers interested in beauty who approach a L’Oreal store will be offered a “buy one, get one free” deal on a L’Oreal hair product. Placecast says 1,500 stores are involved in this effort.

And again, it’s an “opt-in” program, so the only people seeing these ads are folks who said they wanted to receive promotions from O2. The alerts are also capped at 1 per day, and customers are never supposed to receive the same message twice.

Placecast has raised $12 million in two rounds from Quatrex Capital, ONSET Ventures, and Voyager Capital.

Tags: LBS, location, location-based advertising, mobile advertising

Companies: L’Oreal, o2, Placecast, Starbucks, Telefonica






Google making $1 billion a year from mobile

dr evilGoogle executives tried to fend off concerns this afternoon that they’re still making all their money from cheap text ads running alongside the company’s search results and on its AdSense network. So during the conference call discussing third quarter earnings, they presented some numbers about Google’s “emerging” businesses. Chief financial officer Patrick Pichette emphasized that executives are only sharing these numbers once, to make a point about Google’s revenue sources.

Here’s the data they shared:

  • Google’s non-text display advertising has an “annualized run rate” of $2.5 billion, meaning that based on numbers from the last three months, the company is on-track to earn earn $2.5 billion per year. (Google has been placing a greater emphasis on display advertising this year.)
  • On YouTube, Google is “monetizing” 2 billion views per week. The company says YouTube gets a total of 2 billion views per day, so it sounds like it’s running ads on about one-seventh of all views. But executives declined to say whether YouTube is actually profitable.
  • Google is on-track to make $1 billion in revenue from mobile this year. One of the analysts on the earnings conference call wondered whether Google’s ad revenue is threatened by the increasing prevalence of applications on smartphones. (Apple’s Steve Jobs has said that the growth of apps on the iPhone means that the existing search advertising model doesn’t make sense.) Chief executive Eric Schmidt said that assumes the mobile market is a “zero sum game.” Instead, revenue growth suggests that “a rising tide lifts all boats.”

DB2010Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. Join us at DiscoveryBeat 2010 and hear secrets from top industry executives about how to break through and profit in the new cross-platform app ecosystem. From metrics to monetization, we’ll take an in depth look at the best discovery strategies and why they’re working. See the full agenda here. The conference takes place on October 18 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. To register, click here. Hurry though. Tickets are limited, and going fast.

Tags: Android, mobile advertising

Companies: Google

People: Eric Schmidt






Opera gets into the ad business with its Open Mobile Ad Exchange

Opera MiniWeb browser maker Opera Software announced today that it is officially getting into the advertising business with the launch of its Open Mobile Ad Exchange.

The service brings cloud-based ads to feature phones and smartphones via the Opera Mini web browser, which has some 66.5 million users worldwide. It will offer publishers a way to maximize their revenue from Opera apps and mobile websites, advertisers will be able to take advantage of real-time analytics and reporting, and it will have support for advanced campaign management.

The Open Mobile Ad Exchange most likely comes out of Opera’s purchase of mobile advertising firm AdMarvel in January.

Unlike Apple’s iAd (which stems from its Quattro Wireless purchase) and Google’s recently acquired AdMob, which are both focusing on smartphone advertising, Opera may be able to carve out a decent advertising niche among feature phones and low-end smartphones. Opera Mini is one of the most popular ways for feature phone users to browse the web, and Opera’s many years pursuing mobile browsing will make it tough to overthrow.

Tags: Ad Exchange, ads, advertising, mobile advertising

Companies: Opera Software






Sprout blossoms into the AdVine ad platform

advine tron legacySprout, a San Francisco startup that first launched as a platform for building Flash applications, has been refocusing its technology on ad-creation. In case the shift wasn’t clear, Sprout signaled the new focus today by relaunching its flagship product under the name AdVine.

One of AdVine’s big attractions is the fact that it creates ads that can display both the Flash or HTML5 formats. Those ads will use Flash on Web browsers, then they’ll play in HTML5 on smartphones that don’t support Flash. Sprout’s interface has been compared to Adobe’s design program Photoshop, and it’s supposed to make the ad creation process quick and easy for designers. The integration with Google’s DoubleClick ad server should help with this too.

Adam Taisch, the company’s vice president of business development, said Sprout is on a two-week development cycle, leading to a constant flow of new features. Just in the last few weeks, Sprout has added click-to-call and click-to-text options in the ads, he said.

Designers can use AdVine to create mobile ads that are compatible with Apple’s iAd format. In the demo video below, a demonstrator uses AdVine to assemble an iAd for the movie Tron: Legacy, and also shows what it’s like to interact with the ad.

Sprout launched at the DEMO conference now co-produced by VentureBeat.

DB2010Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. We’ll cover the topic at DiscoveryBeat 2010. Startups and big companies alike are encouraged to submit their discovery tactics to our Needle in the Haystack competition. Early bird discounts are available until September 22. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, click here.

Tags: AdVine, iAd, mobile advertising

Companies: Sprout

People: Adam Taisch







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