AdMob Ad Exchange Revisited

June 10th, 2009 | Posted in Buzz, apple, featured, mobile, sales and marketing | No Comments
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

The latest development in our ongoing AdMob experiment has left us scratching our heads once again. As I mentioned in a previous article, we have toyed with the ad exchange before with pretty limited results. This time around the numbers look quite a bit different.

When we turned on the exchange functionality previously, our revenues went down, and we got a ridiculously small number of downloads after testing several ad copy versions. We left the exchange turned off until about a week ago. This time after we turned it on we started to see a drastic increase in revenue due to the fact that we started receiving dramatically larger numbers of CPM impressions from the network. The downloads were still amazing low, to the tune of about 6 downloads/150,000 impressions, but our CPM revenue is up well over 1000% gradually over the course of about 6 days.

I am personally at a loss as to why this might happen. I have no idea how turning on exchange impressions could tick something in the formula that would start serving us more CPM ads or if there was some kind of human intervention either from the network or advertisers. Of course there is the chance that it could be a complete coincidence so we will rinse and repeat to check that out as well.

If you happen to have any insight or inside information that might shed some light on the mysterious AdMob numbers that we discuss from time-to-time please feel free to leave a comment.

iFart Mobile Coming To Android

June 9th, 2009 | Posted in Buzz, apple, mobile | No Comments
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,

android-developer

[UPDATE -iFart now in Android Marketplace]

Whether or not you know of iFart, we have had a ton of fun developing the little novelty app and have began porting iFart to Android. We realize that there are imitators on the marketplace already, but we also realize that we have attained mobile fart dominance and no other fart app stands a chance (just a hint of humor).

At InfoMedia, we have been investing in mobile very heavily over the last few years.  I’ll explain this in more detail in a upcoming article discussing some of the governing dynamics of mobile application development & marketing.

One of the things that we must do in order to fulfill needs created by our specific strategy is to quickly deliver our flagship applications to all major mobile hardware and software platforms. Currently we plan to port applications from the iPhone/iPod platform to Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, and we are investigating Palm Pre.

iFart began the journey to the Android Marketplace about two weeks ago and is moving along nicely.  I can’t say when we will see fit to release the Android version, but I will say next quarter is realistic. iFart is the perfect candidate to get our feet wet in the Android SDK, and also a great opportunity to experience the specifics of the Android Marketplace.

This is the point where someone steps in and asks “Wouldn’t it be more profitable to release more iPhone applications?”  When making decisions regarding developing for various mobile platforms the common practice is too attempt to determine how much initial profit can be made in direct sales. I would argue that commonly a critical factor is left out of the calculation. The target demographic.

The last thing I will say regarding stuff I will cover in a near future article is this: Failing to develop for a particular platform at this stage of the game because “there’s no money in it” is a mistake. Whether or not a platform takes off, the people that download applications from other failing distribution channels are likely to make the move to the platforms that survived natural selection process. Guess what, they will probably download more apps! Draw your own conclusions until next time.