With the exponential growth of mobile advertising, its important to ensure that as media buyers, we are diversifying our mobile buys across all facets of mobile media. With the current growth pace of 80%, its even more crucial now to consider mobile advertising as one of your primary sources of ad inventory. In fact, new report by eMarketer estimates that mobile-ad spending reached $1.45 billion in 2011, up from $769.6 million in 2010.
The following are several major mobile publishing outlets that media buyers can take advantage of:
1. Incentived offer walls
a. Mobile offer walls (i.e. Tapjoy) are high volume ways of generating eyeballs to your app or Smartphone optimized campaign. However, please ensure that you are measuring metrics, as the incentivized motivation could lead to much higher churn and uninstall rate of your campaigns
2. Third party app marketplaces
a. Please note that this is relevant to Droid OS only. Since Droid is an open OS, they of course also have to allow for third party marketplaces like Getjar, as an example to openly compete with Google Play
3. Mobile display inventory
a. You can always purchase banner inventory within the device (i.e. Jumptap) as well as in ap display inventory. Charboost is a good example of a company that powers interstial ad inventory between app stages and levels.
b. The only caveat to buying mobile display, is that these platforms typically charge on a CPC, so it will very important as a savvy media buyer to understand your underlying PPI target goal as well as ultimately, your effective cpi target.
These are just a few of the many ways to monetize currently on Smartphones.
I’m certain there will be an influx of new and creative ways to both monetize your apps and campaigns as well as advertise your products in creative and novel fashions. I encourage you to take advantage of mobile media buying if you haven’t already, or are considering and to also ensure again that you are diversifying your buys. Its vital to find your niche in mobile media, in order to secure your spot in this burgeoning market segment.
