So this is a monetization platform that you might want to check out seriously for your advertising needs:
MoPub — “Mobile Advertising Done Right”
For mobile publishers, MoPub is the only “one-stop shop” ad server designed to manage all your app monetization needs. MoPub’s three-pronged platform means that you can choose how you monetize through direct sold ads, ad networks, and our real-time bidding system, MoPub Marketplace. Designed for unmatched control over and transparency into how ads are performing on your app, MoPub’s platform makes sure that you’re maximizing your ad revenue potential — without sacrificing your user experience. And, since MoPub was founded by app developers, for app developers, our single, open-source SDK is easy to integrate and our platform scales to serve billions of ads every month…
Seems pretty much like the set of services you get with Burstly that we liked on first try a couple years back, right? Well, we’re a good bit wiser since then in the ways of ad mediation. Not to put too fine a point on it, all ad SDKs suck. If one appears to not suck, wait for the next system upgrade. And they conflict with your code, and you can’t get a patch for crashes in them even when you can prove where the problem is, yadayadayada. We worked for more than we care to remember of last year on a custom Mobclix-based mediation layer bringing in something like a dozen different kinds of custom video/rich media interstitial providers for an app that gave up on attempting to integrate Burstly because of a vast array of issues, but what it really came down to was that it wasn’t open source so we couldn’t do anything about the problems we found. Compare and contrast:
MoPub’s client code is hosted on GitHub in the mopub-client project. As app developers, we got frustrated with the fact that most ad networks required a separate SDK binary integration and constant updates to get the latest features. We came up with the “low footprint,” source level approach as a solution to that problem. Integrate a single set of source files into your app, directly through subversion or git, and then you will never have issues with updates…
A compelling consideration, that. Especially as one thing we learned doing that custom mediation layer mentioned above is that all the big money in advertising these days comes from the small upstarts doing rich media and geolocated ads and so forth, so if you’re serious about making money off your advertising you’re going to be messing around with custom SDKs with low fill rates and having them fall back to the chump change you get from the bigger networks. And that process will be much MUCH easier with an open source mediation layer.
However, it’s the money that most of you will quite sensibly make your final call on, no doubt; any of you Dear Readers have actual deployment experience with MoPub and can tell us how it compares to Burstly or Mobclix or whatever else you tried?
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