July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Flurry is launching an exchange dubbed Flurry Marketplace for its mobile advertising platform so that the right advertisers can be matched with the right content publishers. The advertisers can offer bids to buy ads in real-time and target the exact audience they want to reach.

San Francisco-based Flurry makes analytics software that monitors consumer behavior on 1 billion smartphones and tablets each month. It captures over 1.3 trillion actions that those consumers perform in those apps each month, so it has a treasure trove of data that is useful to advertisers. With the new Flurry Marketplace, the company has created an exchange where advertisers and content publishers can team up to target ads at intended audiences in an automated, programmatic fashion.

The bidding takes place in real-time with pre-bundled data from more than 300,000 apps. Advertisers known as demand-side platforms (DSPs) and Agency Trading Desks (ATDs) can now reach audiences in a targeted and automated way through real-time auctions.

“Despite big data advances, app publishers continue to sell inventory undervalued and blind because programmatic buyers don’t yet have a platform that overcomes publisher fragmentation and provides quality audience data in order to improve buying decisions,” said Simon Khalaf, Flurry chief executive, in a statement. “Flurry Marketplace aggregates and enriches advertising inventory from thousands of applications with relevant, granular audience data that empowers DSPs, ATDs, and networks to buy efficiently.”

Market research IDC predicts that real-time bidding (RTB) ad spending will top $13 billion by 2016. With such marketplaces, ad buyers can set bids on the ad impressions, or how much they will pay for their ads to be shown to audiences that meet certain thresholds, such as 18-to-34-year-old females who enjoy role-playing games. The dynamic market determines the best price for the transaction in order to maximize the return on investment for both the advertiser and publisher. Publishers can set a floor price to protect the value of their inventory from racing to the bottom.

With Flurry Marketplace, advertisers can get more granular detail such as gender, device, geography, application category, application, and Flurry Personas (or profiles of users who behave in certain ways). Flurry will give advertisers access to more than 300 million monthly unique users and allow them to bid on billions of ad requests per month. The technology is compliant with an industry standard known as OpenRTB. Flurry Marketplace is part of Flurry’s AppSpot data-powered supply-side ad platform.

“Flurry is on a mission to significantly improve and simplify app advertising,” said Rahul Bafna, head of product management for Flurry advertising solutions. “In the long-run, we believe that delivering big-data powered solutions such as Flurry Marketplace is the only way to ensure a win-win-win among advertisers, publishers, and consumers.”

Flurry says that, compared to other mobile RTB Exchanges (and online ones for that matter), Flurry Marketplace offers high-value audience data bundled into the service. The company says this is a significant differentiator because advertisers have more knowledge about the inventory they’re bidding on (i.e., the audience they will reach). The right advertiser will bid more for the right audience.

You could say that Flurry, the mobile analytics firm with data-based ad platforms, has a hit on its hands. More than a thousand mobile app publishers have signed up in the past three weeks to become part of Flurry’s AppSpot, a data-powered app ad platform.

Flurry AppSpot is a monetization platform for applications with advertising revenue models.  The platform handles the ad serving, ad network mediation, targeting technology and results reporting among other features. The service combines Flurry’s analytics for mobile devices with an app advertising platform that enables publishers to organize and enable access to their audiences in ways that advertisers want to target and buy.

For example, a large brand launching a new product that targets business travelers in the U.S. can have that audience aggregated by Flurry’s AppSpot advertising platform, across its publisher network.  Because the advertiser is reaching a more tightly targeted audience, it’s willing to pay more per user.  For the publisher, this means more revenue per advertising impression. Flurry claims they drive higher publisher eCPMs due to their sizable data set, gathered from Flurry’s analytics data, which tracks more than 60 billion user sessions a month across 250,000 apps on more than 700 million mobile devices

“We were stunned at how much response we had,” said Simon Khalaf, chief executive of San Francisco-based Flurry.

Revenues for the first 500 applications that are live are very strong, Flurry said. An average effective cost per mille (eCPM) is $5.80 across various types of ad formats, such as banners, video ads, or interstitials. That is twice the industry average for eCPMs based on a recent study of iOS and Android by Opera.

StarMaker, developer of apps for the hit television shows The Voice and American Idol, said it used Flurry AppSpot for both higher eCPM ads and for the flexibility to optimize their ad revenue across their networks and direct advertisers.

“AppSpot is delivering exceptional eCPMs for us,” said Willy Pell, Starmaker’s director of engineering. “We also loved the incredibly responsive integration support that made all the difference for us to get up and running quickly.”

Flurry says that publishers can generate significant ad revenues directly from advertisers or indirectly through mobile ad networks and trading desks. AppSpot allows publishers to package up and deliver the right target audiences to each advertiser. And that enables publishers to capture their share mobile app ad market, which could hit $2 billion in 2012.

“The adoption rate of Flurry AppSpot has exceeded our highest expectations,” said Rahul Bafna, Flurry senior director of product management. “Even better, the strong early revenue performance on the platform demonstrates Flurry’s ability to optimize advertising inventory across direct channels, network and trading desks with advanced targeting can make a material difference for the mobile advertising industry.”

MobilityWare, a developer of card games for iOS and Android, uses Flurry AppSpot for their ad monetization. They found that the targeted ads from AppSpot delivered eCPMs more than two times higher than ad networks they had been using for the same inventory.

“We’re excited about using AppSpot to establish our direct sales channel,” said John Libby, president of Mobilityware.  “Numerous advertisers have approached us about running targeted campaigns to our audience, which skews female. With AppSpot, we can deliver what these advertisers want. While we initially chose AppSpot for better-performing ads, we’re blown away by how AppSpot can help us grow our business.”

---

GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

---

Peter Farago, vice president of marketing at Flurry, said the platform  combines Flurry’s analytics with a new ad platform aimed at unlocking the full potential of the mobile app advertising space. The platform is designed to make targeted campaigns and reaching high-value consumers easier for ad agencies, direct advertisers, and ad networks.

Flurry will provide services such as ad serving and network optimization based, and advertisers will pay Flurry only when they use premium targeting to earn additional revenue. These services are tied to Flurry’s analytics data, which tracks more than 30 billion user sessions a month across 160,000 apps on more than 500 million mobile devices.

San Francisco-based Flurry says that consumers are spending 23 percent of their time in apps (vs. TV, Online, Radio and Print) but only 1 percent of advertising dollars are allocated toward mobile today. The gap exists because it isn’t easy to target the entire app-using audience. But Flurry argues that its reach and depth of data can help publishers and advertisers bridge the gap.

For example, if Nike wants to reach 18-year-old to 24-year-old women for a new shoe, their ad agency would use Flurry to buy ads, target the audience, and reach people on multiple mobile platforms using the Flurry AppSpot ad platform. Flurry uses its demographic data to target the ads at the right people and then it reports back the results about whether the users clicked on the ads or otherwise engaged with it. Because the ads hit the right demographic, they are likely to be received more effectively.

In this case, app publishes supply the inventory into which ads are served. Ad campaigns fill that inventory with ads that are targeted at particular users. Flurry’s data enables better targeting, allowing relevant ads to be shown to the right users.

“Compared to online advertising, mobile app advertising can be simpler, better and more powerful,” said Simon Khalaf, president and chief executive officer of Flurry. “In online, there are simply too many moving parts between the advertiser and the publisher, including ad servers, ad exchanges, supply side platforms, demand side platforms and data management platforms. In the app advertising world, Flurry AppSpot delivers an optimal path between advertisers and publishers, adding in ground-breaking targeting and analytics.”

Flurry’s backers include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, InterWest Partners, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, and First Round Capital.