From $0 to $1.27M in Monthly Mobile Ad Transactions in 12 months
(Appodeal Review — 2015)
In January 2015 after a couple of months in testing, we launched Appodeal, a programmatic ad mediation solution made for publishers by publishers, to the public. We grew Appodeal from $0 to $1.27M in monthly ad transactions in just 12 months. I want to share the story of how we got there.
Background:
In 2011, I founded a mobile apps publishing company, Alfa Productions. Over several years, we published over 3000 apps on Google Play and iOS, monetizing primarily on advertisements. We tried all possible ad networks, mediators, and monetization solutions. We learned every monetization trick possible and perfected our knowledge in fine tuning each ad network to achieve optimal performance: price floors, targeting, user behavior, payout models, blacklisting and whitelisting, direct deals, etc.
We built a programmatic ad mediation solution to help us manage monetization for our own apps. In September 2014, we launched the private version of Appodeal and performed a set of experiments on Alfa’s inventory. I was shocked and amazed when we noticed a ~270% growth in revenue from our mobile apps. And I must say, at that moment, Alfa’s monetization setup was sophisticated enough, even without Appodeal.
In October 2014, I made the decision to make this technology available for everyone. It took us several months, and we launched the public version of Appodeal in January 2015.
Today Appodeal is the fast-growing programmatic ad mediation solution for mobile app publishers. Over 4000 apps are integrated with Appodeal. We formulated our mission and product direction over the past year.
Our Mission:
We believe that the mobile ad industry is unfairly built in favor of advertisers. Our mission is to bring the power back to mobile app publishers.
What We Do and How We Do It:
Appodeal is a programmatic ad mediation solution for mobile apps. We increase revenue for publishers by engaging ad networks in real-time auction-based competition for every ad impression.
How We Got Started:
I didn’t have many resources to promote Appodeal so I did what I knew would work — using forums for mobile app developers. I wrote my first post after our launch on Making Money With Android forum, detailing the ins and outs of the solution. Today this post has almost 1000 replies.
Funding:
In fast-paced world of startups, you need to move quickly and to do so, you need to be well-funded. Soon after our public launch, I realized that for Appodeal to continue at its current pace, I needed to secure funding. Fundraising wasn’t easy. I was in the middle of moving to San Francisco permanently and being a Russian-speaking founder in an active and crowded industry didn’t help either.
Mobile advertising has fallen “out-of-favor” with investors; the share of Series A and seed dollars has fallen from 15% to 5% in the last five years (see blog by Tom Tunguz).
After receiving a few rejections from VC, I decided to take a different route and approach large publishers who had tested our product and ask them to invest.
In August, I received a verbal agreement from Ximad, Lametina Holdings, Lucky Star Game and a few angel investors to invest $3.1M to help Appodeal grow platform for mobile app publishers.
Integrations and Partnerships:
While I was looking for funding, our small team never stopped working on improving our programmatic ad mediation algorithm and integrating more ad networks. Now Appodeal’s SDK connects publishers with over 35 ad networks including:
Adcolony, Admob, Applovin, Appnexus, Avocarrot, Chartboost, Facebook, Flurry, Inmobi, Liverail, Mopub, OpenX, Pubnative, Rubicon, Smaato, StartApp, Tapsense, Unisound, UnityAds, Virool, Vungle, and others.
We also partner with the best app development frameworks to help all app developers with ad monetization including:
Unity, Cocos2D-x, Gideros, Marmelade, MonkeyX, Open FL, Xamarin, Scirra, Phone Gap, and others.
Also, we partnered with Kochava and joined Kochava Collective first-ever collection of cross-publisher mobile audience.
Turning a Setback into a Breakthrough:
On my birthday in July, I woke up to face a crisis that could have put Appodeal out of business overnight. AdMob gave Appodeal a three-day warning to investigate and remove apps that generated fraudulent activity. Admob is owned by Google. It is as bad as if your website was blocked on Google search when it generates 80–90% of traffic from search. We were at a loss and reached out to Admob and found a viable solution: have each user create an individual AdMob account and link it to Appodeal. This approach ensured that AdMob still participated in the auction, but paid the user directly.
Despite the long and painful process of having each user create an Admob account, the result was better than we had imagined. Because the eCPM of apps was no longer affected by other apps in the same account, individual accounts made it possible for apps to get the eCPM they deserved.
Appodeal Growth Stats Review (2015):
We focus our growth strategy on creating great content that will resonate with mobile developers and publishers and on building out sales processes.
Our sales team leaders are committed to Appodeal’s growth and the success of our customers: Geoff (Publisher Success Manager), Johnpaul (Publisher Success Manager), Anna (Head of Europe | Publisher Success, Stepan (Head of Russia | Publisher Success).
Website Traffic Growth
In September, we launched Appodeal blog in English, developed a content calendar and strategy. We started to share our blog posts on Medium; I began blogging on Gamasutra. We also published a few sponsored posts educating the marketplace about programmatic ad mediation:
- Programmatic Ad Mediation Is The Next Step for App Publishers
- How Programmatic Ad Mediation Benefits App Publishers
- Mobile Advertising as a Force Multiplier
- Programmatic Ad Mediation: Stop Sending Your Ad Traffic Over the Waterfall
In December, our content marketing efforts began to pay off when our traffic started to increase significantly. In just a month’s time, our traffic grew over 28% (from November to December).
In addition to growth in overall sessions on Appodeal website, we more than doubled our following on Linkedin from ~160 to 450 in less than a month after we began sharing our content in related LinkedIin groups.
Total Ad Impressions Grew to Over 2B per Month
The total number of ad impressions on Appodeal reached 2B in December. We doubled total ad impressions every 60 days starting from August.
Appodeal Transaction Growth:
Other Highlights:
- over 4,000 of apps use Appodeal
- over 8,000 accounts were created on Appodeal
- Appodeal paid the total $6.33M in ad revenue to publishers (basically we displayed a total of $6.33M in mobile advertising)
- over 84% retention rate (customers who tried Appodeal stayed with us)
- Appodeal team includes 40+ employees
- 17 accusations of scamming from fraudulent app de6velopers :)
We work very hard to make our publishers happy, and we are glad when they are willing to share their success. One of our publishers, Stephan Schultz, recently shared his story of how Appodeal doubled his eCPM and provided a better experience for his users in less than a month.
And while we don’t mean to brag, we love seeing similar stories of success and revenue growth in the form of customer reviews.
Our Future Plans and Goals for 2016:
Upcoming releases (Jan 2016):
- releasing Appodeal Insights, which will allow app developers to dig into analytics and slice and dice their performance data with many parameters
- full support for native ads
- update our monetization algorithm for video ads (mostly for Liverail and Spotxchange)
helpMeet us at Casual Connect Conference on Feb 16–18th in Amsterdam
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Read more on Appodeal Blog, ask questions on Quora, and connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin.
