HasOffers, a company offering tools to help companies track the performance of their online ads, has raised a Series A led by Accel Partners, with additional funds from RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser and Founder’s Co-op’s Chris DeVore.

HasOffers is based in Seattle and has 79 employees. It has been bootstrapped, growing on revenues without investment to date, since its founding in 2009. Fun fact: Its co-founders, Lucas and Lee Brown, are twins.

“We really didn’t need to raise money based on our current cash flow and ability to keep growing, but this partnership with Accel changes the game for us,” said Peter Hamilton, the chief executive of HasOffers, in a canned statement.

According to the press release that the company will be issuing tomorrow morning, HasOffers has two products, both delivered as a SaaS (software-as-a-service):

• White-labeled software for networks and agencies to manage their performance advertising programs.
• MobileAppTracking.com (MAT) attributes installs, in-app engagement and purchases back to ad partners (such as social networks, publishers, and mobile ad networks).

Clients for the white-labled product include Bucksense, Tapjoy, SponsorPay, Applift, PocketMedia, OfferMobi, Crobo, and Tapit.

Clients for MAT include SuperCell, HotelTonight, Spotify, LivingSocial, Electronic Arts, Square, and Yahoo!

We contacted Accel’s Rich Wong, who will be joining the board of HasOffers, for an explanation of what motivated the investment.

“In our investment thesis from Accel, we are now in a third phase in mobile advertising,” Wong told us. The first phase included “walled gardens” controlled entirely by mobile carriers. The second phase includes ad networks such as AdMob, Quattro, and others. The third phase, Wong said, is marked by the rise of real-time-bidding (RTB) networks and programmatic buying, and that’s where HasOffers fits in.

“In this phase, the ‘machines are taking over’ and more and more of the ad spend in mobile is going to shift towards a programmatic buying solution, buying across multiple traffic sources, instead of two or three primary ad networks in the previous phase,” Wong said.

The key to that working, Wong said, is having a trusted, independent third-party measurement system, so ad buyers can tell where their clicks are really coming from.

“The days of the CMO not knowing ‘which 50 percent of their advertising was wasted’ is ending,” Wong concluded.

Top photo: The HasOffers executive team. Photo courtesy HasOffers.

Today, not that much has changed.

After debuting close to $40 and cratering to just under $18 in August, the stock has somewhat stabilized in the $25 region, down 30 percent from its opening-day high. And along the way, the story emerged of how Facebook tried to hide some of the mobile risk inherent in its business and how the company panicked and botched its IPO by using vague positive language in its public prospectus and, apparently, specific negative information about slowing revenue growth to institutional investors privately.

Not to mention the $100 million paid to banks to stabilize the stock — on top of $176 million in IPO fees — for efforts that ultimately failed. And technical glitches that cost the NASDAQ $62 million in compensatory fees.

All of which negatively affected the overall IPO market.

That all said, however, Facebook has seemingly nicely recovered from the disaster — at least from a business fundamentals perspective. Revenue growth was strong in its latest quarterly earnings release, with the company booking $1.46 billion in revenue for Q1 2013, compared to about $1 billion a year ago. More importantly, mobile was significantly up, accounting for 30 percent of ad revenues, and Facebook singlehandedly accounted for 6.5 percent of all online ad dollars spent in the U.S.

Not exactly Google numbers, but pretty good nevertheless.

And the company has massively beefed up its advertising options. It’s now posting retargeted ads right in the news feed, once sacrosanct territory. And in a move aimed directly at advertising giant Google, Facebook has launched a self-serve tool that allows advertisers to target its users based on what they actually buy and want to buy offline … which is a significant move to targeting the intent graph that Google hits so well by virtue of being a search engine, but Facebook has often missed since its visitors are on the site to meet and greet people. In addition, as soon as July, Facebook will be rolling out 15-second video ads in the news feed, a product that it will be charging major brands millions of dollars for.

All of which is having an effect.

The consensus recommendation for Facebook is currently a buy, with a price target of $34. Most analysts are in the Strong Buy category, with few or none in the dreaded Underperform or Sell slots. And in the past four weeks, analysts have revised their earnings estimates upward by a factor of 6 to 1.

So there’s a lot of positive in Facebook’s future, and there’s a ton of potential. But it’s still challenging when analysts compare Facebook stock with other internet high-fliers like LinkedIn or Yelp, which rose 148 percent and 48 percent in their first years, respectively.

But at least it’s better than Groupon and Zynga, both down around 75-80 percent.

And, I would argue, while there are a ton of challenges and many very significant competitors — primarily Google — the future for Facebook is bright.

Even if the public start was a stubbed toe.

When I co-founded InMobi in 2007, we took a novel “east-to-west” approach to our growth, starting in India before moving into other developing markets, then finally into more traditional “Western” markets as well.

Because this method of expansion didn’t have any precursors, and mobile advertising was at the time still a very new field, we had to chart our own course and set our own example. And as a corollary, we would have to deal with a number of challenges as we discovered that the mobile landscape was different in each geography we entered, and learn to quickly recover from mistakes.

I’d like to talk about some of the challenges we faced and how we dealt with them, as I believe it will be of relevance to other businesses that are trying to build a global footprint:

Learning while doing

Because we were experimenting with a new business model, we often had to rely on intuition as we calculated our next moves. When you are trying to expand across multiple geographies at a rapid pace, you are bound to slip, and we were no exception. For example, our first forays out of India into other geographies, starting with Indonesia and South Africa, did not yield initial success, and we could not gain a strong foothold in the market. Our lack of understanding of the ways in which brands, advertisers, and consumers communicated and interacted in these markets, and incorrect hypotheses about the overall advertising ecosystem, led to delayed revenue streams. But we learned how the ecosystem worked and began expanding our reach in these emerging markets.

Likewise, when we had to extend the capabilities of our platform to serve multiple regions/countries, we almost ran the risk of jeopardizing existing business in India by shifting focus away from it.

We learned quickly from such wrong moves, and this helped us templatize our forays into new countries, and that is the key takeaway:

An experiential learning approach works well if you can recover from your mistakes quickly and identify patterns and models from within a few iterations.

Recalibrating world view frequently

Working with an evolving technology and business model, and one that had numerous dependencies on the moves of key players in the mobile device and platform platform markets, brought with it another set of challenges: frequently making informed decisions on the roadmap of our technology platform, which was the pivot of our business.

In addition, our geographic expansion plan also compelled us to be agile and flexible.  Once we had tasted initial success, we laid out a plan to simultaneously expand in Southeast Asia (Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore), Western Europe and Japan. Each of these markets had its own characteristics and was very different from one another. Western Europe was developed, and so was Japan, but the latter is a contained market with little in common with the European market. The emerging markets, on the other hand, were evolving and needed a totally different approach.

Clearly, we had to tailor our approach to suit each market, and this meant that we literally had to revisit our assumptions and plans every quarter.

In all of the above, our overall commitment to speed — in thinking and in action — helped, and our approach of trying out and making course corrections, rather than waiting and watching, stood out. To me, the key takeaway from this experience is staying committed to a strategy for the future, while adapting the tactics to the present.

Shaping Management Mindset

While the first two sets of challenges emanated from the market, the third was more internal and had to do with adopting the right mindset.

As a startup with global ambitions, we had several mental hurdles to cross. Learning to think big while being small was one of them. Some of us had a tendency to want to do one thing very well as opposed to developing broader competencies and skills, which is a prerequisite to build scale. Another issue was balancing our short-term needs with our long-term goals. Nowhere was it a bigger challenge than when we opened offices in new geographies and set out to hire the regional anchors. How much to pay, how long to wait for the right candidate, what profile should we opt for?  These were real questions we had to find answers for. We made a few errors of judgment here as well, like hiring candidates about whom we were not completely convinced, before we made the tough call to wait for the right candidates and pay them the right compensation.

The last thing we had to do, of course, was to transform our thinking, speaking and actions to reflect those of a truly global organization, and make the transition from being part of an “Indian” team to a cross-cultural one. This entailed creating a consistent corporate culture with frequent interactions between teams based in India and those in the other markets. By encouraging two-way travel, we ensured that teams from India understood market and cross-cultural nuances early on.

In sum, we learned to be open, introspective and aware of the consequences of your behavior and actions.

Thinking back, what allowed us to surmount the challenges we faced and mold our thinking and actions to suit the purpose was our total commitment to our vision and the excitement of creating an innovative and valuable business model.

That is the overarching message I’d like to leave you with: clarity of vision and purpose is the glue that binds a team together and acts as a lubricant to mitigate the friction caused by obstacles along the way.

For more information on InMobi’s East-to-West strategy, see Naveen Tewari’s first post, here.

Naveen Tewari is InMobi’s CEO and founder. He graduated from Harvard Business School and worked at Charles River Ventures and McKinsey & Company before starting InMobi. InMobi, based in Bangalore with offices in Singapore and San Francisco, currently employs more than 900 people and has taken $216 million to date in venture funding.

photo credit: Stuck in Customs via photopin cc

Tumblr is a great platform for “curating” blogs of sad desk lunches, but it hasn’t exactly blown anyone away, profit-wise.

To help fix that not-at-all-insignificant problem, Tumblr is launching its new mobile ad platform, which will allow brands to advertise their wares from within Tumblr’s mobile apps.

The effort, which is an offshoot  of Tumblr’s existing Radar ad platform, will be joined initially by brands like GE, Warner Bros. and ABC. Similar to Facebook’s sponsored ads, Tumblr’s mobile ads will be clearly marked as sponsored and users will only see four of them per day. (Thank goodness for that.)

The key thing to note here, though, is how Tumblr is presenting the ads: Realizing that the most effective advertisements are those that are hardly distinguishable from the content that surrounds them, Tumblr’s mobile ads look just like Tumblr posts. This means that users can like and share them as if they were regular Tumblr content, which should, in theory, help them spread.

The move comes as Tumblr’s mobile user numbers are starting to near those if its web offering — which makes mobile advertising an important endeavor indeed.

All of  this advertising is meant to bring Tumblr towards a singular key goal: Turning a profit. And it’s a long time coming. “We expect that the monetization will lead us to profitability this year,” Tumblr sales head Lee Brown told Bloomberg in March.

To which the conscientious observer should reply: “It’s about time.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The booming mobile advertising market grew from $1.4 billion in 2011 to $4.1 billion in 2012, and it’s projected to hit a massive $7.3 billion in 2013.

And almost all of it is spent on Apple’s ecosystem.

There’s a reason that even though Android has almost caught up to iOS in downloads, it’s still way behind in monetization. Partially, it’s because iTunes has a long and successful history of commercial transactions, so people feel comfortable clicking and shopping and buying on iOS. Partially, it’s because Apple was the leader in mobile for so long.

But it’s also because advertisers are simply getting fed up with an Android ecosystem that doesn’t convert very well.

Source: MoPub

Mobile ad spend ballooned in March 2013

“There have been whispers and comments around Google’s Play app store, and some of those concerns were supported when they announced a redesign,” Paul Gelb, head of strategy for MoPub, the world’s largest mobile ad exchange says. “If you have people click on your ad and drive them to the app store and that becomes a breakage point … that will reduce the value of the ad that you want to buy.”

Which is a nice way of saying that ads for app installs aren’t always working, even when the mobile user taps on your ad.

Most advertisers and ad exchange partners don’t want to talk on the record, of course. But off the record, they’ll say that Google Play is just not at the quality level of the iOS app ecosystem. There’s too much crap, too much malware, there’s not the level of quality that iOS has … and there is a missing mass of people on the platform who have confirmed credit card accounts and are, frankly, in the demographic who are willing and able to buy.

That may sound sacrilegious to Android enthusiasts, many of whom are tech-savvy and higher-income, but it’s borne out by the numbers.

Not only are 75 cents out of every mobile ad dollar spent on iOS, but iPhone, iPad, and yes, even iPod touch ad rates are much higher. While Android smartphones draw $.50 CPMs (cost per thousand impressions), iPhones pull in $.65 to $.88 CPMs, iPod Touches do $.74 to $.98, and iPads do between $.82 and $1.16.

Source: MoPub

Mobile ad CPMs for the first quarter of 2013

So while tablets are the highest-revenue mobile ad platforms, Android tablets only account for a skinny single percent of all mobile ad sales.

That’s entirely due to the basic question underlying ad pricing: Do they work? Click-through rates on Android devices are about half as good as those on iOS devices, with under one percent on Android tablets and just over a percent on Android smartphones. Meanwhile, iOS devices such as iPads pull in 2-2.5 percent click-through rates, and iPhone pulls in 1.4-1.7 percent.

Source: MoPub

Click-through rates for mobile ads – first quarter of 2013

All of that adds up to an ad-share spend in which iPad almost eclipses the entire Android ecosystem single-handledly, iPod Touch by itself does about a third to a quarter as much as all of Android, and iPhone owns about double the share of all Android smartphones and tablets combined.

Which brings us to the 75 percent iOS ad share:

Source: MoPub

Mobile ad market share, Android vs iOS devices

Does this matter?

On a certain level, Android users might not really care — after all, who likes advertising? But advertising is increasingly driving mobile monetization strategies for app developers, who must therefore care. And that means the apps and experiences Android users will eventually get from their platform suffer from the Android monetization gap.

Which doesn’t mean the gap will exist forever. MoPub’s Gelb isolated two key factors that need to change for that gap to disappear:

“I think Android tablets need to hit. It’s incredibly important — the larger screen just offers more ad potential,” he told me. “Also, there needs to be a bit more certainty and success around identifying high-value users who are known to have credit cards and disposable income.”

The question, of course, is when that will happen.

photo credit: photo credit: swishphotos via photopin cc

Facebook is moving forward with plans for its mobile advertising platform even after concern from users about an oversaturation of advertising and receiving unwanted messages.

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, told reporters today the goal of the advertising platform is to increase engagement and usefulness of advertising, not necessarily increase the number of ads users receive. She noted that the mobile platform may soon become more important than television.

With the recent launch of Facebook Home, a special OS skin for Android users, and the social network raking in 30 percent of all mobile ad spending in 2013, Facebook is clearly planning to capitalize on the opportunity mobile presents.

Last year, U.S. mobile ad spending increased from $1.45 billion to $4.06 billion in 2012 alone, according to data from ad analysis firm eMarketer. This growth presents a 180 percent increase in mobile ad growth, which was driven almost entirely by Facebook. At the beginning of 2012, Facebook wasn’t even in the mobile advertising market, but the company grew its mobile ad revenue to $340 million in one year. That revenue is projected to more than double in 2013.

Mobile devices are in almost every consumer’s hand, opening a door for advertising opportunities that will allow companies to cash in on our always-on lifestyle. According to Sandberg, Facebook is pleased with the company’s advertising platform so far and will continue to monitor engagement to best get messages across.

Users already see plenty of advertising on Facebook, from sponsored stories and posts from brands you don’t currently follow to finely targeted advertising in news feeds on both mobile and desktop applications. Facebook’s new software released this year will surely please marketers and advertisers, but the affect on users remains to be seen.

Image credit: Facebook

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Let’s be frank: Mobile ads suck. Not only are they dull and not making anyone as much money as they should, but people aren’t even clicking them intentionally. In fact, almost forty percent of mobile clicks are made by accident, according to a recent report from eMarketer.

While lots of companies are throwing lots of money at the problem, voice software maker Nuance is looking at it from another, more interesting angle: Instead of focusing on clicks as the success metric for mobile ads, Nuance wants to use voice recognition to engage people in a way that banner ads never could.

“We’re taking the voice assistant tech out of apps and putting it in ads,” Nuance advertisement vice president Mike McSherry said of Voice Ads, Nuance’s new voice-enabled ad platform.

While Nuance’s voice tech is already used in cars, businesses, and hospitals, McSherry says that Voice Ads owes a lot to Siri, Apple’s own voice assistant software. “Siri created an industry. People play with it. It’s witty. Why not give these same sorts of tools to ad agencies?” McSherry said.

Can mobile ads be…entertaining?

At the core of Voice Ads is measurable engagement, which is something that’s been pretty rare for advertising. Think about it this way: For most of its history, advertising has been a one-way street. You watch television and advertisers talk to you via commercials; you read VentureBeat and advertisers serve you banner ads (which can be relevant to you but often aren’t). Absent in both those things, of course, is actual engagement: Advertisers are saying quite a lot to you, but you’re not saying much back in return.

“Magic 8 Ball, will Voice Ads help me make money?”

That idea is turned on its head with Voice Ads, which gives advertisers a tool to interact consumers in a way that’s both direct and, well, entertaining.

To illustrate this somewhat crazy idea, McSherry opened up an interactive magic eight-ball ad for Alpha, a fictional deodorant brand. “Should I buy that ring?” he asks the ad, which, after responding affirmatively  advises McSherry to “use Alpha”, which “smells like money in the bank.” (He did this multiple times, with multiple questions, all of which returned unique responses. Nuance’s tech is definitely robust.)

The conversation was largely silly, but it was still enjoyable to watch – and that’s exactly the point. McSherry wasn’t just watching an advertisement — he was interacting with it.

While Alpha is a hypothetical brand, the sort of engagement that example demonstrates would be ideal for real companies like Geico, which has already built its brand presence around the voice of its gecko mascot. Just imagine an advertisement that allows the Geico gecko to give you personal insurance advice based on your vocal input. (If Geico’s ad guys aren’t already brainstorming something like this, I’d advise them to get to it.)

More engagement, more data

Aside from engagement, Voice Ads also means data. With the platform’s underlying tech, advertisers have a much better idea of which people are actively — and not accidentally – interacting with their ad campaigns.  ”We can measure how much people are actually using this stuff. There are no more accidents,” Nuance marketing chief Peter Mahoney pointed out.

All of these factors combine to support one key takeaway: In Nuance’s ideal world, voice ads will do to advertisements what touch screens have done to computing: If your ads don’t have a voice component, lots of people are going to think there’s something wrong with them — just like people now expect all devices to have touch screens.

Coming to a mobile voice ad near you?

That idea, however, is more of a fantasy right now than reality. Before Nuance answers the expectation question, it first has to answer the adoption one: How many brands and ad agencies will actually end up using Voice Ads?

New technology always takes time to percolate, but McSherry seems confident that once advertisers and brands see what can be done with Voice Ads, it’s going to be tough for them justify avoiding it. “Everyone’s trying to create deeper brand experiences on mobile devices. Voice Ads does that,” McSherry said.

So far things are looking good. Not only has Nuance already inked deals with ad firms Digitas, OMD, and Leo Burnett, but it also has digital advertising companies Millenial, JumpTap and Ad Marvel on board as well. That’s a pretty significant vote of confidence for an experiment that’s just starting out. (McSherry will be providing the first wider public demonstration of the technology at the Mobile Summit today in Sausalito, where VentureBeat has invited 180 leading mobile executives to debate ways to push forward the mobile economy).

The other concern is more relevant to the average smartphone user: How much more annoying will voice-enabled ads be than existing ones? As we’ve seen from banner ads, pop-ups, and behavioral tracking, what’s good for advertisers is often not terribly great for users. While McSherry didn’t have a clear answer for how well the average person is going to respond to Voice Ads,  Nuance obviously hopes mobile users respond well.

My view? Anything that can help companies make money on mobile is ultimately a good thing. Let’s just not make it too annoying — okay, guys?

Photo: Ricardo Bilton/VentureBeat

W3i is rebranding itself as NativeX today and launching a new native advertising platform that it says will enable better monetization for mobile game and app developers. NativeX is also announcing it has added Electronic Arts founder Trip Hawkins as a senior advisor.

NativeX is a platform that allows a developer to integrate an advertisement into the middle of a game. But the developer has more control over the ad than usual. About 65 percent of the space for the ad is under the control of the developer while 35 percent is dedicated to the advertiser. The resulting product is something that appears to be more natural and appealing for a player to click upon, said Rob Weber, co-founder of Minnesota-based NativeX, in an interview with GamesBeat.

“We feel the name change will refocus us on what we are all about,” Weber said.

The goal is to bring some innovation to the in-game advertising market and to improve click-through rates and raise CPMs (cost per mil, a measure of the revenue generated by an ad for every 1,000 people who see it). As the mobile and web markets change, so do developer needs for monetization, Weber said. NativeX wants to move beyond standard display ads with more targeted, effective ads. Interstitial ads might get $2 CPMs on mobile, while native ads such as the kind being created by NativeX can hit $10 CPMs, Weber said.

“Native advertising is the future, and I am thrilled to get involved with this forward-thinking company,” said NativeX advisor Trip Hawkins. “Every major publisher on mobile and web has their eye on native advertising right now. NativeX is proving that we as an industry can do better than banner ads.”

An example, pictured above, is how NativeX could work with a publisher such as iWin, maker of the Deal or No Deal game. To boost iWin’s revenue, NativeX’s team would work with iWin to build and customize a native interstitial display ad like the woman holding the briefcase. NativeX would show the ads to existing partners who might be a fit. Using predictive analytics of the game’s corresponding demographics, NativeX would determine which apps would fit with the campaign. In this case, the demographic is older women who likely have children. So the ad campaign ran with Agnitus’ educational games for kids.

NativeX is already growing fast with its current ad business. The company’s customers reach more than 105 million monthly active users across iOS and Android. And NativeX’s mobile business grew more than 350 percent in the past year. The company has 165 employees and recently added a San Francisco office. I’m moderating a session next week with Hawkins and Weber at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

NativeX will supply its own predictive analytics for ad monetization, but the company is not competing head-on with mobile analytics firms. Weber said NativeX’s revenue is about half from the web and half from mobile. He noted that the cost of user acquisition has fallen in the past few months.

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A lot of people are spending a lot of money trying to fix mobile ads, and yet somehow they still stink.

The latest startup to offer a solution is Namo Media, which is announcing a $1.9 million seed round led by Google Ventures and joined by Andreessen Horowitz, Betaworks, and Trinity Ventures.

Helmed by former Googler and DrawChat/reMail chief Gabor Cselle, Nano Media’s angle on mobile ads is almost too simple: Instead of making ads intrusive, it aims to make them a part of the app experience itself. This, in theory, should fix a lot of the biggest hurdles with mobile ads, not the least of which is that they’re really annoying.

As TechCrunch points out, Cselle himself doesn’t have an advertising background, but he’s supported by Tural Badirkhanli, who’s a former AdMob guy — which certainly helps.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google’s ramping up mobile monetization today with a new sponsored search result ad type, a product listing ad. It also reduces the mobile search presence of the showroomer’s biggest ally: Amazon.com.

Already available on desktop, the new ad type will now be available globally on mobile, Google says. Similar to desktop Google shopping ads, the ad appears when people search for a shopping-related term like ‘washing machine’ or ‘Tassim0.’

People who see the ad can tap a product to learn more and potentially buy it, or tap the “Shop on Google” link to browse other options on Google Shopping, which are sponsored results paid for by merchants. Or, they can narrow their search criteria by price, location, and availability.

The new ad type will ramp up Google monetization efforts on mobile while also providing more advertising options for business. But it’s also a continuation of a somewhat controversial campaign that some have said is trending towards paid search results, which Google said in its IPO it will never do.

This ad type also lends itself perfectly to the practice of showrooming, which is checking out products in a bricks-and-mortar store while looking for the best prices online.

And it’s yet another shot across the bow of Amazon.com, which owns online retailing in the U.S. and also ranks very high in most product searches. This is one more way Google can get closer to merchants directly, reduce Amazon’s sales and search power, and benefit financially to boot.

Google is hosting a webinar tomorrow, March 14th, in which it will unveil more about the new ad option.

photo credit: edkohler via photopin cc

New York City-based mobile ad startup Dobleas has emerged out of stealth with a $5.4 million investment from FreakOut, a Japanese digital marketing company.

Dobleas offers a “real-time mobile demand-side platform (DSP) provider with real-time data.” Ideally, its service will offer better data sources and more transparency to ad buyers and sellers who want to do business on mobile platforms.

FreakOut recently got a similar amount of cash from YJ Capital, the venture capital arm of Yahoo Japan. So FreakOut in turn decided to take YJ’s money and invest it in Dobleas, which was started and spun off by FreakOut President Yuzuru Honda, a serial entrepreneur.

“YJ Capital’s investment in FreakOut, in turn allowing our further investment in Dobleas, is validation of the company’s mobile technology and business model,” Honda said in a statement. “I have the utmost confidence in Dobleas’ executive team to bring value to the mobile advertising market and real-time mobile DSP solution.”

Photo via Dobleas

Now you can find that information about mobile ads on Android apps as well as online.

Today, WhatRunsWhere launched the first in-app ad tracking service for Android, showing what ads are running in which apps, where your competitors are running ads, what their ads look like, and even who is selling them. The goal, according to WhatRunsWhere cofounder Max Teitelbaum, is better performance for your ads.

For instance, as of today, Dropbox is running 11 different ads on at least 3,117 Android apps. And Hyperfocal, an Android app for photographers, is running ads from Expedia, Amazon, Google Play, Gree, and, yes, Dropbox.

You think that might be useful information if you’re Box, SugarSync, or any other Dropbox competitor? Or if you’re an app developer selling an app that competes with Hyperfocal?

“Now … advertisers can develop intelligent strategies for deploying their mobile ad dollars, leading to a greater return on investment,” Teitelbaum said in a statement.

But there’s more.

It also shows better visibility into where the mobile marketing company you hired is putting your ads and what kinds of devices they are running on.

“This is really useful because there is zero transparency into what’s happening on AdMob and other ad marketplaces,” Teitelbaum told me via Skype. “We’ve seen people running iTunes downloaders on Android … which means that viewers can’t even install those apps, and I can definitely say there are some types of apps running brands’ ads that those brands definitely don’t want to have their ads on.”

Here, for example, are the ads running on Hello Kitty Fan Shoe, an Android app, from brands like Ask.com, Google Play, Coca-Cola, and others:

And those 3,117 apps Dropbox is running ads on include Video Downloader for Android, dailyPen, and Cherry Camera:

But while successful, the company is not very creative with its advertising, choosing to use one single design repeated in slightly different formats and sizes. Perhaps that’s one secret of Dropbox’s success?

How does WhatRunsWhere get the ad data? That’s a pretty closely held secret:

“We’ve found a way to be able to monitor these ads. It’s confidential … that’s sort of the secret sauce,” Teitelbaum says.

That secret is the fruit of an acquisition last year in which WhatRunsWhere bought Mobile Ad Spy to add mobile ad tracking to its existing web ad tracking service. Mobile Ad Spy had been built by an engineer who lost a significant amount of money buying mobile ads and wanted to know more about exactly who the mobile ad ecosystem works.

There’s no question that this kind of data would be extremely helpful to companies that are looking to improve their mobile marketing. Or just to those who are curious about where their competitors are spending money.

And it has huge potential to reveal why a company is successful in mobile marketing … or not.

photo credit: >Rooners via photopin cc

Boy, as soon as a great technology starts to get really great, someone’s just gotta come along and gum up the works with ads.

Kidding! Who do you think pays the bills for the whole web of consumer Internet services? Unless you’re writing checks to Pinterest every month, you need online ads like a toddler needs vaccinations.

So we weren’t too surprised to read in our inbox today that Adcade, a New York-based startup, has raised $1.5 million in seed money to HTML5 mobile ads. ff Venture Capital led the round, with participation from Quotidian Ventures, BHV, Great Oaks VC, and assorted angels.

“It’s painfully clear that desktop ads don’t translate well to mobile devices,” said Adcade CEO Rob Cromer in a statement on the news. “We have built one of the most comprehensive HTML5 Canvas frameworks to date and, in turn, we believe our ad technology is leaps and bounds ahead of what is currently available in the market.”

Adcade was founded in 2012. Staffers of note include CTO Buzz Wiggins, formerly of Google, where he worked on innovation in digital advertising.

Image credit: SVLuma/Shutterstock

You pay, that is, while others view.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Tumblr VP Derek Gottfrid said the blogging network has already tested the product internally, will roll it out in the first half of 2013, and is currently looking for advertisers who want to sign up. No word yet, however, on exactly how promoted posts will actually be promoted, or what tools bloggers will have to decide who they get promoted to.

The new revenue will, Gottfrid thinks, drive the 162-employee and 100-million-blog company into profitability this year. Which seems to be a likely goal, even if only a fraction of its 16 billion total page views transition over to the ego-driven monetization model.

Tumblr, which became the ninth most popular site on the U.S. web in 2012, significantly improved its mobile apps late in the year, including its iPhone app and a new iPad app. But the company did not introduce any form of monetization at that time. This new native advertising model will ensure that traditional banner ads don’t clutter the mobile experience, but will present posts to users who might not have intended to see them.

One interesting note that Tumblr’s sales head Lee Brown let slip: Tumblr’s average advertising sale is just under $100,000 … meaning that major brands and enterprises are behind much of the site’s current revenue.

This is once again expanding the native ads landscape. We have Twitter with promoted tweets (which it just started selling via ad partners), Facebook with promoted posts, and now Tumblr with, perhaps, trending Tumbls.

All that’s needed is for Pinterest to introduce promoted pins, which I confidently expect sometime in 2013.

One question: where are WordPress.com and Automattic? (Update March 6: testing native ads too.)

photo credit: matt coats via photopin cc

Facebook’s earnings just hit the wire, showing $1.585 billion for the quarter and a grand total of $5.1 billion for all of 2012, narrowly beating estimates of $5 billion.

But the real standout line item was mobile advertising revenue — the most hotly anticipated and debated figure in Facebook’s books and the one where Facebook far outstripped any forecasts.

Here’s a quarter-by-quarter look at Facebook’s revenues over the past two years:

Obviously, the majority of this comes from advertising — and with its new Graph Search, Facebook is poised to take an even larger share of that market from reigning champion Google. In fact, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbrg said in today’s earnings call that he considers Graph Search the company’s most important product from the past 12 months and that he looks forward to building Graph Search into a meaningful part of Facebook’s business.

Online ads in the U.S. were a $10 billion market in Q4 2012, with Facebook taking home $1.33 billion of that — 13.3 percent of the total market. Advertising made up 84 percent of the company’s total revenue and increased 41 percent year-over-year for Q4.

News Feed ads “turned out even better than we thought,” said Zuckerberg. He said the company is working on more innovative and effective ad products. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg also noted that 65 percent of Facebook’s advertisers are using News Feed ads, which also run in mobile interfaces.

Mobile ads and revenues

As for mobile figures, mobile monthly active users were up to 680 million at the end of 2012, a 57 percent hike year-over-year. Mobile revenue made up nearly one quarter of all ad revenue in Q4 — a (relatively) huge $306 million.

While the analysts at eMarketer pretty much nailed their figures for 2012 revenues, they were surprised at how fast the social network’s mobile revenue has grown.

“The company outperformed expectations again — by a wide margin,” an eMarketer told VentureBeat today via email. “With 25 percent of revenue going to mobile in the fourth quarter, Facebook has cemented its position as the leader in mobile display advertising in the U.S. by a wide margin.”

Facebook’s entry into mobile advertising was a big part of the entire segment’s boom last year, an overall 180 percent increase in mobile ad spend in the United States.

eMarketer estimates that Facebook took home more U.S. mobile display revenue than any other mobile ad publisher in 2012, up to and including rival Google. The firm estimates Facebook earned 18.4 percent of the total U.S. mobile display ad market, up from 17 percent last year.

“The social networking giant offered no mobile ad opportunities at the beginning of 2012 but grew its mobile business at an astonishing — and unexpected — rate,” said an eMarketer rep.

“Before Facebook’s Q3 earnings call, most researchers and analysts expected U.S. mobile ad revenues of roughly $45 to $100 million, according to figures examined by eMarketer. While the company’s total ad revenues were, for the most part, unsurprising, the share of revenues attributed to mobile advertising was far from it.”

Share prices

Analysts had previously forecast Facebook’s 2012 revenues at $5 billion, a significant decrease from a previous $6 billion estimate. Facebook had underperformed analysts’ expectations in the first two quarters of 2012, and with the downgraded annual revenue estimate, share prices dipped below $18.

This morning, the company’s shares were trading at $31.28, their highest price since the stock’s nosedive came to a slow halt last fall. In after hours trading, prices dropped slightly to $30.71. Take a look at Facebook share price performance over the last six months:

This kind of uptick has put Facebook stock squarely in the “most improved” category for consumer-facing tech companies, with share prices rising around 35 percent in the past six months:

Shares have been closing above 13-day and 50-day exponential moving averages (EMAs), indicating bullish performance for the near future.

The company’s initial public offering saw shares trading in the low to mid-$40s before the bell; throughout the day and the months to follow, share prices dropped dramatically. However, as many analysts and investors pointed out, Facebook was and is still at the beginning, both in terms of share price and revenue.

“This is an eight-year-old company,” pointed out Rebecca Lieb, an Altimeter Group analyst. “When Google went public, they had only recently developed ad products. Facebook is at the beginning of mobile products, advertising products — and it hasn’t even started with commerce products.”

“Facebook has just scratched the surface of its revenue and advertising,” said Menlo Ventures managing director Mark Siegel. “They’re going to grow with a much more diverse income stream than what they have today.”

And speaking of diverse revenue streams, let’s take a closer look at one of the stars of today’s show: Facebook’s mobile revenue.

Gifts

Another entirely new line item on Facebook’s budget is Gifts, which the company launched to a small group of users near the beginning of Q3 2012. Initially, the service, which let users send physical gifts to one another and let Facebook keep a small cut of the profits, seemed like a great addition to Facebook’s revenue streams.

“Gifting is a very unique form of e-commerce, and we thought there was a lot more innovation that could be going on there,” said Gifts creator Lee Linden in a recent VentureBeat interview. While he couldn’t get specific about how much Facebook takes in the transactions, he did say, “We’re starting with the U.S., and we’ll evaluate in the future what makes sense,” indicating that the company does plan to go global with the new e-commerce product.

“I think these can be big opportunities for us in the long term,” said Zuckerberg, “but for the next year at least, our work around ads will have by far the biggest impact on our business.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

This is a guest post by Tom Burgess, CEO and co-founder of Linkable Networks.

If there is one thing I know about advertisers from my career in the industry, it’s that we’re always chasing something. Like some people say about the dating game, it’s all about the chase in advertising: tracking down the latest trends, channels, and platforms to distribute your message.

But ultimately, we’re chasing attribution. Brand managers and advertisers want to know their media spend is being allocated efficiently and want to know that it is actually driving consumers to buy the product.

By now, most marketers and brand managers have probably heard the phrase “lead with mobile.” I agree with this, but what does it really mean? Should brands only focus on mobile advertising? Should all your media efforts should be derived from the mobile experience?

It’s easy to get this wrong. At first you might think mobile advertising makes sense because the ad will be where the many connected consumers are. But this isn’t right. Who really watches a video mobile ad all the way through and then goes to the brand’s Facebook page to learn more?

The answer, rather, is “mobile enablement” and looking for ways to add mobile components to more traditional ads.

Mobile Enablement

Imagine this. Take every ad across every medium and give it a mobile component. Give every ad a consumer call to action to be completed via their mobile device. These calls to action must be simple with low barriers to entry, such as texting a promotional code, scanning a QR code, or encouraging consumers to access a brand’s mobile app.

By enabling a mobile component to your ad (whether print, TV, or any other kind), opportunities for consumer engagement increase because you’re engaging with a consumer where they’re already paying attention –- and it’s simple, quick and easy. It’s more likely to be a good use of your marketing dollars because now, the print ad that originally would just have created consumer awareness of your brand –- at best -– is now encouraging the consumer to get out there and do something as a result.

Those who take charge are now becoming active participants rather than passive viewers. And let’s face it: aren’t we all looking for active brand advocates at the end of the day? With mobile enablement, you can get just that: a consumer interacting with the brand you are marketing.

Some companies like Starbucks are increasingly using location-based networks such as Foursquare to highlight an offer, coupon, or just a reminder to stop by. These are similar to a push notification you get on your smartphone when you receive a text or a new email, but they’re only triggered by a person who comes near a specific location, making it worthwhile for the consumer and the company. Companies like Placecast make this easy for brands to implement into their marketing efforts.

Disney, one of the most famous brands in the world, successfully deployed an advertising campaign over the summer featuring a mobile call-to-action, encouraging consumers to download its new mobile app. Disney’s Mobile Magic app allows users to search its amusement parks for attractions, check wait times, and look at exclusive photos and videos.

The Disney campaign’s ads were placed in print, radio, and television, featuring a StarStar code. To download the app, users are asked to dial the StarStar code. When they dial the code, users hear an automated message and simultaneously receive a text, directing them right to the download page. This call-to-action is seamless, easy, and satisfies both parties. The consumer and company both accomplish what they set out for, almost instantaneously.

Consumer engagement is what the advertising industry needs to ensure ad spend is targeted, effective, and worth every penny –- especially as the mobile industry continues to evolve. The winners in the field will be those who continue to distribute advertising funds across all mediums but with mobile enablement. Nobody leaves home without their phone these days and advertisers must adapt to the new mobile normal.

So, you can “lead with mobile” by adding mobile to all the media you already work with.

Tom Burgess is the CEO and co-founder of Linkable Networks. He is a seasoned executive with deep interactive advertising and digital media technology experience. In 2001, Burgess founded Third Screen Media, the world’s first mobile advertising network, and it was acquired by AOL in 2007. Prior to his tenure at Third Screen Media, Burgess served as President of internet portal CollegeLink.com where he guided the company to a successful public offering and later orchestrated sale of the company to Monster.com.

Businessman using smartphone via Digital Genetics/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Gentlemen may prefer blondes, but advertisers like iPads.

More than Android tablets and smartphones, or iPhones, iPad apps command higher rates and are in greater demand by advertisers, according to data released today by MoPub, one of the largest mobile ad exchanges.

Overall, mobile ad prices rose over 50 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012, but advertisers paid most for ads on iPads: $1.12 per thousand impressions. iOS ad prices in general rose 66 percent, while ads on Android devices became 54 percent more expensive.

Source: MoPub

Mobile ad prices

Part of the reason is higher click-through rates. While Android devices see click-through rates of about one percent, owners of iOS devices tapped on ads 1.3 percent of the time early December, and an even higher 1.7 percent in early January.

One interesting question for mobile advertisers: are rich media ads more effective than static ad images?

According to Mopub’s data, gathered from over 30 billion ad impressions in October, November, and December last year, the answer is: not really. While rich media ads are clicked on more frequently, with about 20 to 37 percent higher click-through rates, they also cost more. In fact, rich media ads cost between 27 and 40 percent more than traditional ads, making for a fairly difficult cost-benefit analysis with your CFO.

Perhaps that’s one reason Apple’s iAds are MIA over the last year.

MobPub also released data on the top 12 verticals mobile ads are sold in, with social networking at 6.9 percent leading sports and games, deadlocked at 5.6 percent. Utilities and music round out the top five:

photo credit: Straws pulled at random via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

I started my user experience education in a very different way than most.

Long before smartphones, apps, and mobile advertising, I worked for The Walt Disney Company … but not as a technologist. I was a costumed martial arts performer and my manner of ‘user-engagement’ was as Leonardo – the blue bandana-wearing, katana-wielding, pizza-eating member of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – who performed together with his turtle brothers on stage at the Disney MGM Studios in the early 90s.

As strange as it might sound, many of the lessons that I learned about Walt Disney’s philosophy for crafting a deep, engaging guest experience have inspired my core principles around breakthrough mobile user experience.

Now, more than ever, the mobile app landscape is seeing an increased focus on the importance of a deep, engaging user experience.  Not only must the app itself be handcrafted to surprise and delight the user, but integrated advertising units must do the same. Publishers and brands are both starting to appreciate the importance of crafting deep brand experiences, instead of just slapping a banner onto the bottom of the screen.

2012 made a half-step in this direction with the adoption of rich media advertising.  Rich media ad units are still typically screen-edge banners, but they offer more resolution, higher-quality animation, and more varied tap actions.  Although rich media was a much-needed upgrade to previous mobile banners, the next phase will be much more dramatic.

2013 is shaping-up to be the year of native mobile advertising, much to the benefit of publishers, brands, and users.

Native ads are different from conventional ads in three specific ways:

1. They are more organically integrated with the app itself (think beyond the banner)
2. They expose more of the phone’s internal features (photo roll, advanced social media, etc.)
3. They provide for much more engaging ad creatives and branded content

While the shift to create a native ad experience on mobile might seem revolutionary to some in the industry, it’s at the core of what I’ve been working on at Zumobi for years and reflects many of Walt Disney’s principles that I learned from my experiences as a Turtle. With this in mind, here are a few Ninja lessons that I see reflected across the dynamic landscape of mobile advertising and user experience…

We should all strive to surprise, delight and engage our guests

At Disney, you’re not an employee, you’re a Cast Member. You’re not at work, you’re On Stage.

With mobile advertising, we are challenged every day to move beyond the 320 x 50 cage, and truly express a client’s brand in a way that is native to their unique values. While banner advertising is an important aspect of advertising, it is not a style that surprises, delights, and engages the user. Tomorrow’s native app-within-an-app experiences will let users make purchases, share user-generated content photos and media, and engage deeply with social media.

As designers, we should strive to channel Walt’s philosophy to create tomorrow’s breakthrough native mobile experiences.

They can’t see your face; they CAN see your expression

When you’re in costume as a Ninja Turtle, people can’t see your face directly.

However, every emotion, smile, and expression is channeled through the character, and consequently felt by the guests.  I believe that the same metaphor applies to software, apps, and mobile brand experiences. While the user cannot see the designer, they can sense the expression that they wore when they handcrafted a given user experience.

In this way, it is always essential to remember that the passion seeps beyond the confines of an app or campaign, and directly drives engagement.

Zen and the art of mobile advertising

There is a yin and a yang to all things, including mobile advertising.  In the same way that soft-style kung fu blurs the lines between striking and blocking, good native advertising blurs the lines between content and sponsorship.  Have a lifestyle app targeted to mothers? Offer recipe content as part of your campaign. Want to reach potential auto buyers?  Offer compelling automotive content in mobile enthusiast sources.

This is an incredibly exciting time for apps, mobile, and advertising – the most dramatic opportunities are still untapped.

While the last five years has proven to be thrilling in the landscape of mobile, I foresee the next five years to be even more exciting.

John SanGiovanni is the Co-Founder and Vice President of Product Design at Zumobi where he coordinates the product design strategy and manages Zumobi’s in-house creative studio. A former Microsoft Technical Evangelist, John has more than 13 years of experience as a wireless strategist and mobile user interface designer and has authored or co-authored more than 12 patents in the areas of mobile advertising, hardware interfaces, and interaction techniques for next-generation mobile devices. John recently spoke at the Seattle Interactive Conference where he presented his case for the future of mobile advertising. View his complete session here: or the highlights here

photo credit: Jenn and Tony Bot via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The mobile advertising industry has seen a huge boom in 2012 — and it’s almost entirely thanks to Facebook.

As the year draws to a close, data from ad analysis firm eMarketer show that by branching into mobile ads, the social network helped U.S. mobile ad spend jump from $1.45 billion to $4.06 billion in just 12 months — a 180 percent increase year-over-year.

eMarketer notes that Twitter’s Promoted suite of ad products were also part of the growth, as were Google’s mobile ads. But the analysts place much greater significance on Facebook’s role in mobile ads.

“Facebook’s Q3 mobile performance is one major reason for the change,” the firms said in a statement on the figures.

“The social networking giant offered no mobile ad opportunities at the beginning of 2012 but grew its mobile business at an astonishing — and unexpected — rate. Before Facebook’s Q3 earnings call, most researchers and analysts expected U.S. mobile ad revenues of roughly $45 to $100 million, according to figures examined by eMarketer. While the company’s total ad revenues were, for the most part, unsurprising, the share of revenues attributed to mobile advertising was far from it.”

Facebook grew its mobile ad revenue from a flat zero in 2011 to nearly $340 million in 2012. The network is projected to pull in around $850 million for mobile ads in 2013.

For contrast, eMarketer pegs Google’s mobile ad sales at $750 million for 2011 and $2.17 billion for 2012, making up the lion’s share of all mobile ad sales at 56.6 percent of U.S. sales. Mobile search accounted for most of Google’s success in this area.

Twitter also posted zero mobile revenues in 2011 and, according to eMarketer, around $135 million on mobile in 2012. Pandora, Apple, and Millennial Media round out the other top mobile ad sellers.

Nevertheless, mobile ad sales remain a very small percentage of digital ad sales, let alone overall ad spend. Mobile accounts for only 2.4 percent of all ad budgets for U.S. brands, eMarketer says. The company expects mobile to overtake radio ad spend in 2016, by which time eMarketer estimates mobile will make up 11 percent of all ad sales.

Here are some charts from eMarketer on this data:

Top image: nokhoog_buchachon/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

A new study by the Interactive Advertising Bureau says that most of our mobile video watching actually isn’t very mobile at all.

Sixty-three percent of video-watching on mobile phones, the study said, happens right at home, sweet home. And 36 percent that is right in the front of another, bigger screen: a home theater system, laptop, or a tablet. In other words, the researchers say, mobile video isn’t a way to kill minutes wasted in lineups or something to do when there are no other entertainment options, and this has implications for what kinds of video content brands and entertainment companies should focus on creating.

“We need to see mobile as a primary screen for on-demand consumption, not as an afterthought,” digital agency 360i’s president David Levin said in a statement.

The IAB did not speculate on why supposedly “mobile” video is mostly consumed at home, but this makes a lot of sense. Not only is your phone the most personal device — the go-to device wherever you are — but video consumes a lot of bandwidth. Data costs money when on cellular networks, and it’s typically much slower than on your own home Wi-Fi.

What do we watch? Almost exclusively entertainment content, strongly trending to music videos. There’s a reason Gangnam Style is the most-watched video in history.

• Music videos (45 percent)
• Movie trailers (42 percent)
• Tutorials/How-To’s (41 percent)
• Funny short video clips (37 percent)

What we share with others, though, is a little different: Funny clips and music videos are the most likely to be shared; tutorials and movie trailers are not nearly as viral.

Of course, the Interactive Advertising Board is interested in the use of mobile video for marketing purposes. How do people feel about mobile video ads?

• 53 percent said they’re OK with mobile video advertising
• 48 percent said video ads should relate to the video content they’re watching
• 44 percent remember seeing video ads (10-15 second spots are the most memorable)

The small but intensive study — just 200 participants — lasted for two weeks.

photo credit: mark sebastian via photopin cc

Facebook stock is up nearly 10 percent in after-hours trading after the company announced its third quarter earnings. The company beat market expectations, but the Wall Street love may be coming from its hope for Facebook mobile.

Facebook made 14 percent of its advertising revenue from mobile this quarter. This comes after Facebook introduced a new iOS app that finally took care of a number of paralyzing problems.

In the last quarter, Facebook saw a 61 percent increase in its mobile monthly active users — up to 604 million as of the end of this quarter.

It seems the company is starting to focus mostly on the small screen. Facebook’s vice president of mobile partnerships, Vaughan Smith, recently said Facebook is thinking “how can we create the right mobile experience first and the desktop can catch up later.”

This is a good lift for Facebook whose stock has been a fairly tumultuous ride for investors.

The company otherwise had a fair quarter, with $1.26 billion in revenue. Revenue from advertising brought in 86 percent of that total. Facebook also closed its Instagram deal in this quarter and launched Gifts, a product that lets you buy physical items for people on the social network and share them to the recipient’s Timeline. Many think this could be a new revenue product for the company.

FB data by YCharts

Mark Zuckerberg image via Flickr

Apple products are usually big hits, which helps.

But more importantly, they punch above their weight for content consumption. For example, even though Android smartphones have been outselling iPhones for some time — accounting for 68 percent of smartphones sold in the second quarter of 2012 — it was only in the last week or so that Android phones finally outpaced iPhones for mobile web share.

Most importantly, mobile marketing experts Velti say, mid-size tablets perform much better for advertisers.

For example, tablets in general have two times the clickthrough for full-size ad interstitials, a fact that Velti says is due to rich media ads achieving higher engagement due to the larger display. But within tablets, the 7″ midsize is even better. The Amazon Kindle Fire clickthrough rate for large banner ads is more than double iPad 3′s and about 50 percent higher than the Samsung Galaxy Tab’s.

Velti says that the lower price Android tablets, including mid-sized versions, brought in new tablet purchasers last year. It’s likely that a smaller and cheaper iPad will do the same.

That all adds up, according to Velti, to potentially the most successful mobile device for consumer engagement with mobile marketing.

photo credit: la legra negra via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Mobile ad exchange MoPub has just announced a new infusion of cash: $12 million from new and existing investors, including a strategic partner overseas.

Mobile topics, from the mobile web to native apps to mobile revenues, are hotter than ever before, and everyone’s scrambling to make a profit on the explosion of smartphone growth. MoPub tells us it forecasts mobile ad spend to reach $7.1 billion by 2015, and the company plans to be scooping up the majority of that amount.

MoPub will be using the new funding to make big hires in New York and San Francisco, all the better to get the attention of ad agencies and brands.

The round, MoPub’s second institutional infusion, was led by new investor Jafco Ventures, with participation from existing investors Accel Partners and Harrison Metal Capital. Also participating were the partners of Iris Capital, which has recently established a partnership with French telecom giant Orange and Publicis Group, one of the largest communications agencies in the world. This strategic investment will no doubt open a few doors internationally for MoPub.

MoPub launched in November 2010 and today claims it serves more than 15 billion ads each month across 10,000 apps and 5,000 publishers. Its not-so-secret sauce is its real-time ad auctions that bring ad platforms, networks, and other first-party bidders in to haggle over publishers’ ad space.

(Sound familiar? The real-time bidding concept is a major component of Facebook’s new ad exchange, too.)

MoPub previously took $6.5 million in a Series A fundraise as well as undisclosed amounts of seed funding from Accel, Harrison, and AngelPad. The startup is based in San Francisco and has a New York satellite office.

Top image courtesy of Kraevski Vitaly, Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

As Facebook’s mobile troubles have shown, companies haven’t quite figured out how to crack the nut that is mobile advertising.

And worthless clicks aren’t helping. The name given to clicks on ads that don’t offer a significant return-on-investment, worthless clicks account for up to 40% of mobile clicks, says mobile app marketing platform Trademob.

In survey conducted in June, Trademob analyzed 6 million clicks and found that a disturbing amount of them came from two areas: One group were the fat finger-induced ”accidental clicks” which make up 22 percent of worthless clicks. These are a big problem on smartphones, where the lack of screen real estate often makes it difficult for users to accurately interact with on-screen objects.

The remaining 18 percent of useless clicks, Trademob says, come as a result of overtly fraudulent activity either from botnets or sever-side cheating by publishers. Engagement fraud is a big problem that’s plagued online advertising since the very beginning (and one that’s been troubling Facebook in a very major way lately).

The good news? The numbers are actually on the decline, dropping seven percent in comparison to a 2011 survey by Pontiflex.

So what’s the solution? Trademob says advertisers can improve their prospects both by blacklisting sources of worthless clicks and by improving ad placement (which Trademob, unsurprisingly, offers advertisers the ability to do).

Publishers and developers can use Nexage’s system to reach “high-value” consumers in order to increase revenue and engagement.

With so much discussion occurring in the industry about mobile monetization and the growing interest of targeted, real-time advertising, Nexage seeks to capitalize on a massive marketplace. According to Gartner, the mobile advertising market is expected to grow to $20.6 billion by 2015 and mobile RTB will constitute 30% of the market.

The initial $10 million came in on June 6th and was led by SingTel Innov8. The additional chunk of change was invested by Hearst Ventures, the center capital arm of Hearst Interactive Media.

Hearst also joins Relay Ventures and GrandBanks, who previously invested in Nexage’s first $4 million round in 2009.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Independent mobile ad network InMobi has launched a new, free Ad Tracker that can measure mobile conversion rates without needing to know your phone’s unique identifier (UDID), the company announced today.

Apple has begun rejecting apps that access a user’s UDID, which is the most common tracker for advertising, over privacy concerns. We recently reported that app developers could lose up to 24 percent of their ad revenue without UDID access. As the second largest mobile ad network after Google, InMobi is especially looking to solve this issue and identify ways to track without depending on UDID.

“If you have been relying on UDIDs for iOS mobile app conversion tracking, you will need to find a new solution,” InMobi product manager François Deschênes told VentureBeat via e-mail. “Because of Apple’s announcement in August 2011 that they would deprecate UDIDs, the scale and efficacy of conversion tracking solutions – or in-house matching using UDIDs – is declining.”

The company’s Ad Tracker lets advertisers tap some of InMobi’s power without costing a dime, including access to real-time analytics and intelligence. Developers can integrate and use Ad Tracker for free. It works across all ad networks and measures multiple conversions across mobile web and apps. Ad Tracker is separate from InMobi’s huge ad network.

Deschenes notes that InMobi has been pushed hard not only by UDID being phased out but also by the rise of users depending on mobile versus other electronics.

“There is a gigantic gap between time spent and media investment in mobile right now,” Deschênes said. “Consumers in the U.S. are spending more time on mobile than laptops, desktops, or TVs. The driving force behind any shift in media dollars into new channels is having an understanding of that channel’s true value. Analytics is a crucial enabling tool in order to provide that level of visibility to advertisers.”

The company lists the following benefits of using InMobi Ad Tracker:

• Network agnostic and works across all mobile ad networks
• Tracks multiple conversion types across mobile web and app inventory
• Combines multiple tracking technologies to ensure no dependencies on UDID and any form of device ID
• Single login to access conversion data across all mobile ad networks
• Real-time dashboard view of all conversion events
• Ability to define bespoke goals, for example, downloads, registrations, payments, etc.
• Conversion data can be passed back to the originating mobile ad networks to enable real-time optimization
• Easy SDK integration for iOS and Android Apps and JavaScript integration for mobile web campaigns
• Completely free to integrate and use.

San Francisco-based InMobi has raised around $216 million to date, with its last funding round totaling a staggering $200 million. Its backers including SoftBank, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Sherpalo Ventures, and Mumbai Angels. The company also has offices in Bangalore, Johannesburg, London, Nairobi, New York, Paris, Seoul, Singapore, and Tokyo.

Photo credit: nokhoog_buchachon/Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Application developers may start to lose up to 24 percent of advertising revenue as Apple turns away applications using UDID, or unique device identifier, data.

“The move away from UDIDs threatens advertising revenue that many publishers depend on in order to support their content creation and businesses,” said Jim Payne, co-founder of MoPub, in a statement. “It’s clear that Apple needs to address this issue with an appropriate alternative, because the damage to a publisher’s bottom line will likely be material if UDID data actually disappears.”

Advertisers look at UDID data to determine the level of success a campaign may have in a certain app. It can tell you the types of users that will see the ad, and it delivers conversion data on each user (for instance, if an advertisement has led to a person downloading a new app). It measures “an ad’s effectiveness and value,” MoPub explained.

Advertisers pay by impression, or who sees the application. Without that data, advertisers are taking a greater risk deploying campaigns. They are unable to tell whether that impression is really valuable, and are thus are less likely to pay big amounts for those impressions. According to MoPub, an eCPM, or cost per thousand impressions, with UDID data could fetch .76 cents, whereas one without the data would only bring in .58 cents.

That adds up and for apps that rely on advertising revenue, this can take a big chunk out of their livelihood.

Apple decided to turn away applications using UDID because of privacy concerns. Individuals did not want their unique identifier being shared with advertisers. And with debacles like Path and other major apps using the address book to gain new users without permission, mobile privacy is in the spotlight. Developers are going to need to find a new way to prove their user quality or risk losing out.

Image via Tom Cheredar

Germany-based independent mobile ad network madvertise has acquired Turkish mobile-advertising company Mobilike.

Both companies are leaders in their respective markets, with madvertise delivering 2 billion monthly ad impressions across Europe (Germany, France, UK, Spain, Austria, and Switzerland) and Mobilike delivering 300 million monthly ad impressions in Turkey, covering 60 percent of that country’s mobile ad market.

The combined company will be well-positioned to begin a push into the Middle East, said Carsten Frien, the cofounder and chief executive of madvertise.

“It not only gives us access to the Turkish market, but it gives us a beachhead to the entire Middle East region,” Frien told VentureBeat. “We’re going to use our presence in Turkey as a launch pad to further territories.”

For instance, Frien said that he would be traveling to Dubai in the coming week to explore business opportunities there.

Even without the planned Middle East expansion, Turkey is an attractive market for mobile companies. With a population of 60 million people, half of which are younger than 26 and many of which are tech-savvy smartphone users, it’s a country poised on the edge of the mobile revolution. (Turkey is also an e-commerce hotspot, as VentureBeat editor-in-chief Matt Marshall discovered when he visited there last year.)

Madvertise plans to realize additional efficiencies by transferring Mobilike’s ad network, which is currently running on a third-party platform, to madvertise’s own, homegrown ad network.

“We have a very strong, German-engineered technology platform,” Frien said. It’s a real-time, automated bidding and trading platform, much like what Google offers in AdWords, except optimized for the mobile world. Automated bidding is a growing trend, cutting out packaged media deals and driving CPMs down for web as well as mobile publishers — but it delivers greater efficiency, through market mechanics, and helps keep costs down and performance up for mobile advertisers.

The technology transition will take 2 to 3 months, Frien said.

Madvertise also has a technology that enables it to target specific individuals with a high degree of accuracy without using UDIDs or other personally-identifiable information. It does that by correlating a variety of data, including GPS signals, device information, and wireless tower information, to make educated guesses about specific individuals’ identity, allowing it to retarget advertising based on prior behavior.  The technology can target individuals with 95-98 percent accuracy, Frien said.

Madvertise can also target mobile advertisements based on geographic location — for instance, delivering ads only to users within a 1 mile radius of a Starbucks.

Madvertise has 75 employees and is based in Berlin; Mobilike has 15 employees and is based in Istanbul. Madvertise has raised two rounds of capital: a first round led by Early Bird Capital that was in the “single digit Euro millions” and a second round in 2011, led by Blumberg Capital, for $10 million. The company is now hoping to close a “very significant” third round, of $15-20 million, for the fourth quarter of this year. This is madvertise’s first acquisition.

Terms of the deal were not immediately available.

Photo of Carsten Frien courtesy madvertise.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Korean electronics giant Samsung is launching its own mobile ad network to challenge Apple, Google, and Millennial Media, according to the Wall Street Journal.

While Apple’s  iAd hasn’t been particularly successful (so much so that Apple revised its terms in February and again earlier this week), Millennial Media has stuck it out as an independent mobile ad company that successfully IPO-ed last week. And of course, there’s Google, which is known for its prowess in online ads.

Now here comes Samsung, which will be teaming up OpenX Technologies to create space on applications that can be sold to advertisers through an ad exchange.

“This is the first time any device manufacturer has entered the ad tech space in this way,” OpenX CEO Tim Cadogan told the Journal. “It is becoming very clear to the principals in the mobile space that advertising is going to be a very important part of the revenue mix.”

Because Samsung offers all manner of smartphones and tablets, it makes sense for the company to find ways to monetize open space inside applications. Advertisers will be able to buy ad space in an auction system that’ll exist through both app developers and Samsung.

The ad network should launch some time in the second half of 2012, with pricing yet to be detailed.

Samsung Galaxy Note photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Baltimore, Md.-based Millennial Media is the second-largest mobile ad platform in the U.S., and it’s just increased its IPO starting price range.

Previously, Millennial named a range of $9 to $11 for its initial public offering. The new prices are $11 at the low end and $13 at the high end. The company aims to raise $122 million in its IPO and will be offering a total of 10.2 million shares for public sale. The amount raised from the deal are expected to be around 20 percent higher than they would have at the originally named prices.

The company’s shares will be listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol MM. Currently, some of Millennial’s competitors in the hot mobile ad platform space include Apple’s iAd and AdMob, a relatively recent Google acquisition. While Apple stock is trading at a record high of $613 per share, iAd has not been a big hit with advertisers, to say the least.

All this, however, works out to Millennial’s advantage, as it ends up being the only one of the three principal companies in mobile advertising that isn’t directly tied to a manufacturer or operating-system maker. Currently, Millennial claims 16.7 percent of the mobile ad placement market share.

Millennial Media was founded in 2006 and saw $104 million in mobile media placement sales in 2011. Financial firms Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Barclays are named as the underwriters for the IPO.

Image courtesy of emin kuliyev, Shutterstock