Interview with Pavel Golubev (Appodeal) about publishers, monetization and advertising mediation
At the White Nights Moscow 2017 conference, Alexey Pisarevsky, CEO of Getloyal , spoke with the CEO of the bright Appodeal mobile advertising mediator .
Since its launch in 2015, Appodeal has been changing the application monetization industry and setting new standards that are aimed at the creators of mobile apps, not advertisers. Appodeal increases revenue over 15,000 apps.
In an interview discussed:
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Read the full transcript of the interview.
PRO TEAM
Did you say that 20 people flew you to White Nights?
Yes. Two days before the conference, we had a strategic rally for the whole team, and the management flew from different regions. And we sat on Sunday from seven in the morning.
Where did the people come from?
We flew the guys from Barcelona, ​​from Barnaul, from San Francisco, there were also Muscovites. More from Ukraine. All of our key employees from different regions came together in order to determine our strategy for the next quarter and take stock of what we have done.
Why do you have an office in Barcelona? In Moscow, more or less clear, in San Francisco, too. About Barnaul I will not ask. Why Barcelona?
I did not build my business around a place, but around people. I was lucky to work together with Anna - this is the head of our European department. She lived in Barcelona, ​​and therefore our European office is also formed in Barcelona.
You did not offer her to move to San Francisco or Moscow?
I think that the European region needs to be developed, being in Europe. The issue of local mentality is of great importance, it is the ability to communicate with local vendors in the market, grow local sellers. Taking a person from his native region, from his native environment, and dragging to a completely different region, in my opinion, is not very effective, because a person again has to learn everything anew, face problems that he has never encountered before, and so on.
Appodeal at the White Night Conference in Moscow
Do you have any rituals in your company that allow you to work effectively in such a distributed team?
The most important driver for the effectiveness of a distributed team is to have confidence in your team. It is very important to move away from micro-management and it is very important to trust your team as much as possible, develop your team, help them develop, and not try to make all the decisions in the company on their own. As I said, I was very lucky with my team. The guys make very cool decisions. And even if sometimes there are any mistakes, I understand that this is part of the growth, part of the process. It seems to me that this is the most important thing in the efficiency of a distributed team.
In addition, Slack helps us a lot, we have the whole team in Slack. We have channels such as #DailySummary, where every day every employee unsubscribes, what he did (in short), what he plans to do tomorrow, and what problems he has. Accordingly, all these reports are public - any employee can read them.
In which language?
In English.
Does everyone communicate in English?
Not all, but most of the communication on common topics in the company takes place in English. But, for example, when we come to Moscow and are engaged in local discussions here, and with us there are no people who do not speak Russian, we always turn to Russian.
PRO APPODEAL
What is the main thing in your company if you single out one thing? Sales or technology? I understand that it is always in the complex. But if you choose one thing?
Technology.
There is a lot of competition in the application monetization market, especially in the USA. A bunch of companies, and the competition for the publisher is even stronger than the competition for the advertiser. How do you not just survive, how do you also successfully survive?
I would say that competition for an advertiser is just a kindergarten, compared to competition for a publisher, when it is necessary to integrate the SDK, when the sales cycle takes more than a year, when the integration itself requires a huge amount of resources from the publisher. Yes, you are right - the competition is very high.
Three qualities that help your company to be among the leaders?
The most important thing that helped us grow so much is that initially we were sharpened to publishers.
But not you alone. There are a lot of companies that are sharpened on publishers.
In principle, the majority of companies that are currently working in the market, they are, in essence, are advertising networks and operate - they work simultaneously with the advertiser and with the publisher. There is a very strong conflict here. On the one hand, you want to buy a show as cheap as possible. On the other hand, you want to sell it as expensive as possible. This is a conflict that is not solved.
That is, the business model of mediation only works on the publisher?
Yes. We initially started as a publisher, and not as an advertising network, and for this reason we do not have our own advertising Demand. This helps us to focus our algorithms, our products as publishers as much as possible, and not to look for a compromise between this and that - aha, if we make a publisher here like this, then this may be disadvantageous to our advertisers. This all results in a large number of details that make our product much more convenient and suitable for the publisher, and not for the advertiser.
What is your key market - the USA or Russia?
We generally have three key markets - this is Russia, Western Europe and the USA. At the same time, it should be understood that we work with publishers exclusively. We have a lot of Russian publishers, but many of these publishers produce global products, which are then featured in the American App Store. Therefore, most of the trading companies are American.
But most of the Russian publishers?
I would say this: 40% of publishers are Russia, another 40% are Western Europe and 20% are the United States.
I think that the competition in the American market is much higher ... I noticed such a thing while living in America - Americans are less open to some new things. This applies not only to advertising. This applies to everyday things.
Seriously? Are Americans less open?
For example, if you look at the banking sector, then American banks are a huge legacy.
But this is easily explained by the fact that just for a long time the industry has existed. The most advanced banks are in Africa, because they appeared recently and immediately on new modern systems. And the banks of America are really great.
Well yes. And, perhaps, with advertising the same story - advertising has appeared a long time ago, and a lot of infrastructure has already been built around advertising. This is still noticeable. People prefer to risk less, and less open to trying something new.
Americans risk less !? Wait, it's contrary to everything we know about Americans.
Give me an example of how Americans have risked a lot lately.
It seems to me that many Americans initially, being immigrants, come there. Yes, they come for a new life, they are open to some new things, and so on.
But when you are already in the second, in the third generation, you have a stable pay-check. You know exactly how you will spend your next day, what time you marry or marry, how many children you will have, what house you will live in, what kind of mortgage you will pay for this house, and how you will spend your pension, that is, they it's all planning.
I agree.
It becomes harder for you to allow: “Ah, I’ll quit my job and go to travel somewhere”. Or: "Oh, I will leave work and go to do my startup." Because life is already planned out.
And therefore it is harder for you to defend your decision, including to publishers?
Yes. I think this is one of the reasons - in general, Americans are more closed.
You bought the company "Corona Labs". What was it? Was it a team purchase, first of all, either the purchase of technology or the purchase of inventory?
It was, first of all, the purchase of a brand. Corona is a fairly strong brand.
Inventory, in fact?
What do you mean?
Connected publishers?
Publishers - yes, to some extent this also increased our awareness in the American market. We bought Corona - this does not mean that all the inventory that was developed at Corona immediately went to monetize with Appodeal. On the contrary. When we bought Corona, Corona was quite a closed product. There was a deshmanskaya business model, where the framework was initially positioned as free, but then, as your project developed, you began to stumble upon all sorts of royalty, incomprehensible revs, and so on. And the first thing we did was to unscrew all the nuts, make an enterprising free version, release alternative paid plugins in order not to make a revs opaque to our users. And we do not have the task to make our mediation somehow exclusive. On the contrary: open to the fact that as many partners as possible work there.
Plus, I believe that Corona is a very cool framework for creating 2D games. I believe that kazualki is easier to do at Corona than on anything, so for us this is a very good synergy.
I think all our viewers are interested in numbers. Can you share what momentum you are now missing through the traffic?
Yes. Appodeal now spins about 300 million hits every day. This is about $ 5 million each month. Accordingly, our margin is somewhere around 10%. We earn about $ 0.5 million every month and spend about the same.
And how many publishers do about?
At the moment, we have several thousand publishers - I don’t remember, unfortunately, the exact number, 3-4 thousand publishers, but I don’t remember exactly.
Is there a lot of traffic that you miss, show, brand media?
It very much depends on the format. For example, if you take banner stripes, there is a lot of brand advertising there, and I don’t see it leaving it.
Rather, on the contrary, there will be more coming.
Yes. They just often say that “here, the banner is a dead format that does not work for anyone.” It does not work for performance, and for mediak, for which performance is less important, for which coverage is more important, banners from a monetization position are excellent. Fullscreen, a display is a format in which brand advertising is often seen, but playable advertising still prevails.
Source: Appodeal.com
You spend quite aggressively on your own marketing; you are the top sponsor of conferences, including White Nights. Do you think this costs pay off or is it an investment in the future, in your brand?
First, we must understand that everything that we spend, we ourselves earn. We have long ago reached the stage of self-sufficiency and do not spend the money that we do not have. For us, this is definitely a good growth driver. Over the past year we have grown almost 3 times as a company.
There is an opinion that you are so aggressively spending on marketing, because you want to make an exit soon. How true is it?
We get some offers regularly. And it was just one of the topics that we discussed now with our team. When I came to my team and said: “Guys! Here we have an offer, they want to buy us for $ 50 million. What do we want to do? ”. The guys said that: “Pasha! You what We still have so many different cool things that we want to make, which we haven’t released yet, let's come again. ” And the team is really rushing from what we are doing. And I also rushing.
You understand that it is always a matter of price. It is always a question of what is offered. But on the whole, my team and I are determined to develop further. We see a lot of potential in RTB, in the blockchain.
Blockchain What are you doing with the blockchain?
We are going to launch a decentralized RTB-exchange soon, which will be based on the blockchain. And our idea is to completely eliminate intermediaries from the advertising RTB-market and to ensure that for every dollar that the advertiser spends, the publisher receives a dollar without a commission. And this blockchain, which we will roll out, it will be fully supported by large publishers and with large advertisers in the face of DSPs. We think that this is a real opportunity to finally remove intermediaries from this chain.
And where will your earnings be?
As in any cryptobusiness, transactions within the RTB-exchange go through, using a certain cryptocurrency, for example, the Appodeal token. And it is clear that at the start of this project we release some quantity of coins, the issue of which is limited. We immediately take away part of ourselves as founders of this project. These tokens that we keep for ourselves, their capitalization is growing, as the volume of traffic processed by the exchang also grows.
Soon wait for ICO Appodeal?
Yes.
What is the company's overall goal for three years ahead?
We are developing several areas. Our mediation is a very strong product now, and we will continue to hold our positions, invest and continue to grow.
We are now rolling out a large number of new products that will allow us to do better cross promo, more interesting to segment users. We analyze advertising revenues by cohort of users in partnership with attribution partners. This is all that concerns mediation - it can be disrupted and disrupted, developed and developed. In addition, we have a story with a decentralized exchange, which we are going to develop.
One of our other areas is the traditional RTB-exchange, which we built this year. Now 15 DSPs work with us, and we plan to bring this number to at least 200 in the next couple of years.
PRO PERSONAL
Three entrepreneurs who inspire you?
I come to mind is Ilon Musk, Tinkoff and Steve Jobs.
Can you name the main minus of life in the Valley regarding life in Moscow? Pluses are clear - there are probably a lot of pluses.
It seems to me that in Moscow is a very cool service. You can order any certificate, and the courier will bring it to your home in just a couple of hours.
It's true.
It seems to me that Moscow has a cool nightlife. Here is a cool entertainment. And it seems to me that people outside the Valley are more versatile.
Are everyone too turned up on IT?
Well, not only on IT - IT, yoga, Burning man and a dozen other interests.
But sometimes you want some kind of carefree youth, communication about anything. This is a bit lacking in the Valley.
Subscribe to our Habra blog and youtube channel, do not miss the new issues of Mobio Talks !
Since its launch in 2015, Appodeal has been changing the application monetization industry and setting new standards that are aimed at the creators of mobile apps, not advertisers. Appodeal increases revenue over 15,000 apps.
In an interview discussed:
')
- application monetization market;
- competition for publishers in the United States and Russia;
- effective advertising formats;
- purchase of Corona Labs;
- technology of mediation and advertising optimization;
- and much more.
Read the full transcript of the interview.
PRO TEAM
Did you say that 20 people flew you to White Nights? Yes. Two days before the conference, we had a strategic rally for the whole team, and the management flew from different regions. And we sat on Sunday from seven in the morning.
Where did the people come from?
We flew the guys from Barcelona, ​​from Barnaul, from San Francisco, there were also Muscovites. More from Ukraine. All of our key employees from different regions came together in order to determine our strategy for the next quarter and take stock of what we have done.
Why do you have an office in Barcelona? In Moscow, more or less clear, in San Francisco, too. About Barnaul I will not ask. Why Barcelona?
I did not build my business around a place, but around people. I was lucky to work together with Anna - this is the head of our European department. She lived in Barcelona, ​​and therefore our European office is also formed in Barcelona.
You did not offer her to move to San Francisco or Moscow?
I think that the European region needs to be developed, being in Europe. The issue of local mentality is of great importance, it is the ability to communicate with local vendors in the market, grow local sellers. Taking a person from his native region, from his native environment, and dragging to a completely different region, in my opinion, is not very effective, because a person again has to learn everything anew, face problems that he has never encountered before, and so on.
Appodeal at the White Night Conference in Moscow
Do you have any rituals in your company that allow you to work effectively in such a distributed team?
The most important driver for the effectiveness of a distributed team is to have confidence in your team. It is very important to move away from micro-management and it is very important to trust your team as much as possible, develop your team, help them develop, and not try to make all the decisions in the company on their own. As I said, I was very lucky with my team. The guys make very cool decisions. And even if sometimes there are any mistakes, I understand that this is part of the growth, part of the process. It seems to me that this is the most important thing in the efficiency of a distributed team.
In addition, Slack helps us a lot, we have the whole team in Slack. We have channels such as #DailySummary, where every day every employee unsubscribes, what he did (in short), what he plans to do tomorrow, and what problems he has. Accordingly, all these reports are public - any employee can read them.
In which language?
In English.
Does everyone communicate in English?
Not all, but most of the communication on common topics in the company takes place in English. But, for example, when we come to Moscow and are engaged in local discussions here, and with us there are no people who do not speak Russian, we always turn to Russian.
PRO APPODEAL
What is the main thing in your company if you single out one thing? Sales or technology? I understand that it is always in the complex. But if you choose one thing?
Technology.
There is a lot of competition in the application monetization market, especially in the USA. A bunch of companies, and the competition for the publisher is even stronger than the competition for the advertiser. How do you not just survive, how do you also successfully survive?
I would say that competition for an advertiser is just a kindergarten, compared to competition for a publisher, when it is necessary to integrate the SDK, when the sales cycle takes more than a year, when the integration itself requires a huge amount of resources from the publisher. Yes, you are right - the competition is very high.
Three qualities that help your company to be among the leaders?
The most important thing that helped us grow so much is that initially we were sharpened to publishers.
But not you alone. There are a lot of companies that are sharpened on publishers.
In principle, the majority of companies that are currently working in the market, they are, in essence, are advertising networks and operate - they work simultaneously with the advertiser and with the publisher. There is a very strong conflict here. On the one hand, you want to buy a show as cheap as possible. On the other hand, you want to sell it as expensive as possible. This is a conflict that is not solved.
That is, the business model of mediation only works on the publisher?
Yes. We initially started as a publisher, and not as an advertising network, and for this reason we do not have our own advertising Demand. This helps us to focus our algorithms, our products as publishers as much as possible, and not to look for a compromise between this and that - aha, if we make a publisher here like this, then this may be disadvantageous to our advertisers. This all results in a large number of details that make our product much more convenient and suitable for the publisher, and not for the advertiser.
What is your key market - the USA or Russia?
We generally have three key markets - this is Russia, Western Europe and the USA. At the same time, it should be understood that we work with publishers exclusively. We have a lot of Russian publishers, but many of these publishers produce global products, which are then featured in the American App Store. Therefore, most of the trading companies are American.
But most of the Russian publishers?
I would say this: 40% of publishers are Russia, another 40% are Western Europe and 20% are the United States.
I think that the competition in the American market is much higher ... I noticed such a thing while living in America - Americans are less open to some new things. This applies not only to advertising. This applies to everyday things.
Seriously? Are Americans less open?
For example, if you look at the banking sector, then American banks are a huge legacy.
But this is easily explained by the fact that just for a long time the industry has existed. The most advanced banks are in Africa, because they appeared recently and immediately on new modern systems. And the banks of America are really great.
Well yes. And, perhaps, with advertising the same story - advertising has appeared a long time ago, and a lot of infrastructure has already been built around advertising. This is still noticeable. People prefer to risk less, and less open to trying something new.
Americans risk less !? Wait, it's contrary to everything we know about Americans.
Give me an example of how Americans have risked a lot lately.
It seems to me that many Americans initially, being immigrants, come there. Yes, they come for a new life, they are open to some new things, and so on.
But when you are already in the second, in the third generation, you have a stable pay-check. You know exactly how you will spend your next day, what time you marry or marry, how many children you will have, what house you will live in, what kind of mortgage you will pay for this house, and how you will spend your pension, that is, they it's all planning.
I agree.
It becomes harder for you to allow: “Ah, I’ll quit my job and go to travel somewhere”. Or: "Oh, I will leave work and go to do my startup." Because life is already planned out.
And therefore it is harder for you to defend your decision, including to publishers?
Yes. I think this is one of the reasons - in general, Americans are more closed.
You bought the company "Corona Labs". What was it? Was it a team purchase, first of all, either the purchase of technology or the purchase of inventory?
It was, first of all, the purchase of a brand. Corona is a fairly strong brand.
Inventory, in fact?
What do you mean?
Connected publishers?
Publishers - yes, to some extent this also increased our awareness in the American market. We bought Corona - this does not mean that all the inventory that was developed at Corona immediately went to monetize with Appodeal. On the contrary. When we bought Corona, Corona was quite a closed product. There was a deshmanskaya business model, where the framework was initially positioned as free, but then, as your project developed, you began to stumble upon all sorts of royalty, incomprehensible revs, and so on. And the first thing we did was to unscrew all the nuts, make an enterprising free version, release alternative paid plugins in order not to make a revs opaque to our users. And we do not have the task to make our mediation somehow exclusive. On the contrary: open to the fact that as many partners as possible work there.
Plus, I believe that Corona is a very cool framework for creating 2D games. I believe that kazualki is easier to do at Corona than on anything, so for us this is a very good synergy.
I think all our viewers are interested in numbers. Can you share what momentum you are now missing through the traffic?
Yes. Appodeal now spins about 300 million hits every day. This is about $ 5 million each month. Accordingly, our margin is somewhere around 10%. We earn about $ 0.5 million every month and spend about the same.
And how many publishers do about?
At the moment, we have several thousand publishers - I don’t remember, unfortunately, the exact number, 3-4 thousand publishers, but I don’t remember exactly.
Is there a lot of traffic that you miss, show, brand media?
It very much depends on the format. For example, if you take banner stripes, there is a lot of brand advertising there, and I don’t see it leaving it.
Rather, on the contrary, there will be more coming.
Yes. They just often say that “here, the banner is a dead format that does not work for anyone.” It does not work for performance, and for mediak, for which performance is less important, for which coverage is more important, banners from a monetization position are excellent. Fullscreen, a display is a format in which brand advertising is often seen, but playable advertising still prevails.
Source: Appodeal.com
You spend quite aggressively on your own marketing; you are the top sponsor of conferences, including White Nights. Do you think this costs pay off or is it an investment in the future, in your brand?
First, we must understand that everything that we spend, we ourselves earn. We have long ago reached the stage of self-sufficiency and do not spend the money that we do not have. For us, this is definitely a good growth driver. Over the past year we have grown almost 3 times as a company.
There is an opinion that you are so aggressively spending on marketing, because you want to make an exit soon. How true is it?
We get some offers regularly. And it was just one of the topics that we discussed now with our team. When I came to my team and said: “Guys! Here we have an offer, they want to buy us for $ 50 million. What do we want to do? ”. The guys said that: “Pasha! You what We still have so many different cool things that we want to make, which we haven’t released yet, let's come again. ” And the team is really rushing from what we are doing. And I also rushing.
You understand that it is always a matter of price. It is always a question of what is offered. But on the whole, my team and I are determined to develop further. We see a lot of potential in RTB, in the blockchain.
Blockchain What are you doing with the blockchain?
We are going to launch a decentralized RTB-exchange soon, which will be based on the blockchain. And our idea is to completely eliminate intermediaries from the advertising RTB-market and to ensure that for every dollar that the advertiser spends, the publisher receives a dollar without a commission. And this blockchain, which we will roll out, it will be fully supported by large publishers and with large advertisers in the face of DSPs. We think that this is a real opportunity to finally remove intermediaries from this chain.
And where will your earnings be?
As in any cryptobusiness, transactions within the RTB-exchange go through, using a certain cryptocurrency, for example, the Appodeal token. And it is clear that at the start of this project we release some quantity of coins, the issue of which is limited. We immediately take away part of ourselves as founders of this project. These tokens that we keep for ourselves, their capitalization is growing, as the volume of traffic processed by the exchang also grows.
Soon wait for ICO Appodeal?
Yes.
What is the company's overall goal for three years ahead?
We are developing several areas. Our mediation is a very strong product now, and we will continue to hold our positions, invest and continue to grow.
We are now rolling out a large number of new products that will allow us to do better cross promo, more interesting to segment users. We analyze advertising revenues by cohort of users in partnership with attribution partners. This is all that concerns mediation - it can be disrupted and disrupted, developed and developed. In addition, we have a story with a decentralized exchange, which we are going to develop.
One of our other areas is the traditional RTB-exchange, which we built this year. Now 15 DSPs work with us, and we plan to bring this number to at least 200 in the next couple of years.
PRO PERSONAL
Three entrepreneurs who inspire you?
I come to mind is Ilon Musk, Tinkoff and Steve Jobs.
Can you name the main minus of life in the Valley regarding life in Moscow? Pluses are clear - there are probably a lot of pluses.
It seems to me that in Moscow is a very cool service. You can order any certificate, and the courier will bring it to your home in just a couple of hours.
It's true.
It seems to me that Moscow has a cool nightlife. Here is a cool entertainment. And it seems to me that people outside the Valley are more versatile.
Are everyone too turned up on IT?
Well, not only on IT - IT, yoga, Burning man and a dozen other interests.
But sometimes you want some kind of carefree youth, communication about anything. This is a bit lacking in the Valley.
Subscribe to our Habra blog and youtube channel, do not miss the new issues of Mobio Talks !
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/341008/
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