Under The Bridge

So we really haven’t gotten into the advertising side of iPhone programming that much, aside from casually noting a few links, but we’re starting to notice that some people are doing better at it than actually selling their programs. At least, there’s enough money in it now for people to FIGHT! So break out the popcorn and follow along with the developing Clash of the Juggernauts!

Juggernaut A in this case is AdMob, which it seems is the current biggest ad server in the mobile space, and Juggernaut B is AdWhirl, which makes a pretty compelling case to sign up with it by acting as a mediation layer instead of a direct provider. This did not go over well with Juggernaut A, so they decided to take their toys home with them:

Beginning July 22, AdMob will no longer serve ads requested from iPhone apps that employ ad network mediation layers such as AdWhirl or Tapjoy. This change will enable us to provide our publishers and advertisers, as well as end users, with the best possible experience and results…

Yeah, sure. We were raised on a dairy farm, so we know exactly what we’re smelling here. And so do most others; the discussion on the iphonesb list was … spirited, with threads like Who hates AdMob today? Hard to miss that sentiment, indeed. However, as you can see in the admob blocked adwhirl, now what? thread, Admob does indeed generally make up the bulk of revenues. Which is why, as this particularly perspicuous post portrays,

My theory goes as such: AdMob is frightened. They have a dominant position, but suddenly an influx of competitors has put the heat on 
them. I mean, frickin’ 800-pounds-ads-gorilla Google is getting into the game. And AdWhirl allows them to switch at a moment’s notice.
So, they make the decision to “balkanize” the target: “with us or against us”. They say: if we stop serving ads to AdWhirl now, when competitors can’t match our inventory and payouts, the large number of people having us as a primary revenue stream will have to switch to the AdMob SDK or lose us as a revenue stream. Makes sense in context.
Of course, this situation is not going to last. Competitors will eventually start to catch up to AdMob (I mean, frickin’ Google). And AdWhirl is a mid-to-long-term competitive advantage too large to drop…

Yep, we’d agree with that. There’s lots of other good insight in that thread worth checking out, too, but you get the gist of it.

Also note the thread My E-mail to AdMob about the adwhirl isssue, which sideslips into a discussion of new ad player MdotM, in which the founder shows up to fill in some background on it; and some more hard numbers on advertising return for your consideration in that thread as well.

And finally, if you haven’t come to a firm conclusion about which direction to take your ad-supported iPhone programming yet, then read this last thread, Thanks for all the support – AdWhirl, from one of the AdWhirl cofounders:

In terms of updates, we’ve been in communications with AdMob and the big requirement for them was not that developers couldn’t use both AdWhirl and AdMob, but rather, since they couldn’t tell when a developer was using AdWhirl to cycle through AdMob ads (since we requested directly from the library), they had to ban anyone using AdWhirl. That was why, after talking to them, we immediately pumped out a new version of the library that pulled AdMob’s SDK out, and differentiated our ads from AdMob’s ads. Developers can now safely implement both AdMob and AdWhirl with their own logic, but of course AdWhirl has no visibility into what is happening with AdMob and can’t help facilitate any optimization, customization, or ad tracking. (our blog post about this is here: http://www.adwhirl.com/blog)
Keep in mind, though, AdWhirl isn’t just about maximizing revenue and optimizing fill-rates (although we do that, too!) – we allow developers to create their own custom ads dynamically (both icon+text as well as full-width banner images) and link to wherever they’d like to. We realize other ad networks / companies will soon be following suit with their own house-ads products, but keep in mind that, as an OPEN PLATFORM, AdWhirl is planning to open up our community of over 1000 publishers across over 1500 apps, such that you guys can soon start helping one another directly with cross-promotion and getting apps past the top 100 without paying several thousand dollars to an ad network. There’s value in this community as you guys have clearly known for awhile!
Plus, we’re going to be offering new ways to monetize soon that break the whole advertising paradigm.
The important thing is we’ve worked really hard to make sure you guys aren’t forced to make a choice, which is what our open platform is all about.

Well, we know who we’re going to bet on as the long term iPhone advertising success story here!

Colophon:

For day 3 of The Great Wordpress Client Test, our post is courtesy of

MacJournal 5.1.3!

This one, well … it’s not called “MacBlog”, you may notice — and that is for good reason. Although I suppose this “journal” concept must appeal to some not insignificant body of people or else it wouldn’t be into version 5, it’s just not designed as a blog management tool. So there’s really no point listing specific issues with WordPress, we’ll just jump straight to the conclusion of “pick something else” and give it a 3/10 for getting a post up with a picture, although we had to sort out a really annoying amount of formatting and metadata afterwards, and HTML editing is just not available!, which puts MacJournal right off the WordPress coder geek reservation far as we’re concerned.