Appodeal - free advertising revenue optimizer for mobile developers.

With this post I would like to officially introduce myself and briefly introduce you to our project. My name is Pavel Golubev, since 2009 I have been working in the development and publication of mobile applications. Our team at one time launched the Columbis SaaS-service for travel agencies, allowing to automate their activities. After that, I moved to the United States, San Francisco, and here I continued to work in the field of mobile advertising. At some point, we had a need for a platform that would increase advertising revenue in our applications. We spent several months searching for such a traffic optimization tool, after which we decided to make it ourselves. As a result, the development for internal needs has become an independent project - Appodeal , in the blog of which this publication is posted.



Appodeal is now a free mobile advertising revenue optimizer. The project inherited the original idea when developed as an internal tool: it is focused on the developer of mobile applications, and not on the advertiser. Before each application creator, sooner or later, the question of monetization arises and, if the choice is made in favor of advertising, he faces a number of issues and difficulties:

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• which ad network to choose;
• how to connect to it;
• how high the fill rate of this network is;
• how high eCPM is for the region of your audience in a particular network;
• what type of payment is suitable for you (CPI / CPM / CPC);
• is there a plugin for the framework in which you are developing;
• how to end up withdrawing your money.

It was these problems that pushed us to develop Appodeal. The goal we set ourselves, in general, is obvious: to free the developer from having to solve all the above problems on his own and create a service for him that will do everything for him.



In fact, we offer the developer to transfer to us the management of the campaign for monetization of the application, so that at this time he could do what the developer should do - code, and not work as a kind of “sales manager”.

How it works

The main headache when placing advertisements in your application is the zoo of ad networks. All of them provide different conditions and policies and, at the same time, you need to connect to each network individually. Therefore, the first strength of our project, I would call a single SDK in your account. You connect to the Appodeal, and with everything else, for example, with the connection to the above-mentioned zoo, we understand ourselves.



Also, our service automatically receives reports from advertising networks, analyzes them by parameters such as country, application, advertisers. For each ad request, Appodeal dynamically builds a list of ad networks, which is sorted based on the expected eCPM. After that, each application polls the networks in order until it receives a response. All this is done to avoid low occupancy rates and allows you to access networks with the highest possible eCPM. But this is not the end. Within each of the ad networks, for each of the connected applications, a waterfall is built from several units that have a different eCPM within the acceptable minimum.



In networks that allow it, we automatically analyze advertisers and, if necessary, add them to the blacklist.



What can Appodeal:

• Providing access to the largest advertising networks: Chartboost, AdMob, AppLovin, Amazon Ads and others;
• Providing access to the main RTB-exchanges: Rubicon project, OpenX, Nexage, MoPub, Smaato and others, in order to organize the flow of funds and advertising hits, including;
• Analysis of the behavior of users of the system and the dynamic definition of the most appropriate type of advertising - CPI, CPC or CPM;
• Support for a large pool of frameworks (Unity, Cocos2dx, Marmalade, Gideros, PhoneGap, Adobe Air);
• Payments on demand, without waiting for NET30 or NET60.

The latter should be said in more detail. Usually, ad networks force developers to wait between 30 and 60 days, only after which the latter can receive money from advertising in their application. We adhere to user-friendly policies and transfer funds at any time, even on the first day after placing an advertisement. The developer can get his money on wallets PayPal, Webmoney, Yandex.Money, Google Wallet, bank transfer and even in Bitcoin.



There is only one limitation - the minimum amount of payments. Now it is $ 20. And yes, I repeat, for developers Appodeal is free.

Due to what the project lives

A logical question, given that we do not take money from clients, but everything is simple. Our business model is built on the direct sale of your, developers, traffic to large advertisers at a higher rate than were offered by advertising networks.



The project team consists of 12 people who work on it almost around the clock. The company was built entirely on its own funds, until 2015 we did not receive investments. As a founder, I feel all the delights of launching and active development of the project: all the savings have been spent, the car is sold, I sleep about four hours a day. But as it seems to me, it is worth it. Appodeal is gaining momentum, receiving a lot of positive feedback and approaching the break-even point.



While the project is getting on its feet, we are not sitting and not waiting for profit, but we are developing the direction of video advertising, in the first version there is support for UnityAds. In May, we performed at Casual Connect Asia in Singapore and launched full iOS support. In the near future - to perform adequately at the Casual Connect in San Francisco.