27 July 2009

Mobile Advertising Solution : Smaato

Like I said some days ago, I'm currently looking for the best ads solution to use in VGTrailers, my Flash Lite developer challenge entry.

I contacted 6 companies and got 4 replies.
From my developer point of view, the best of them is Smaato.

Smaato selects ads from others ads networks (from their homepage : AdMob, Third Screen Media,...) so no need to register in every ads network, only register on Smaato.

They made a test server available so you can ask for test ads without problem.
And I won't talk about their support who get an answer to every of my questions...and I got a lot (Thanks Robert!)

XML API is very well done and documented.
Among the cool features of the API, I noticed
- clean XML results
- IP and UserAgent are optional parameters, unlike other solutions
- ask any MMA standard ads size you want (XLarge, Large, Medium, Small), linked or not to phone' screen size since they don't userAgent
- ask any number of ads you want (so you can place 1 or X ads on a screen)
- keywords and categories target : you can almost 'select' the ads you want for better CTR.

I spent some days making a SmaatoAdRenderer, it wasn't very difficult but I wanted a generic one.
So I thought I find THE ads solution I was looking for and, with my renderer ready, asked for a publisher ID (ie registration).
And, then, the dream came to an end : Smaato is a professional solution for... professionals.
You MUST be able to reach 1 million ads/month else Smaato will close your account.
I found it out 1week ago and I'm still sad thinking about it.

Anyway, I got back to the 3 other solutions !
Like I did with Smaato, I'll share my impression soon....

1 comment:

Robert Guenther said...

Hello William,

thanks a lot for the great feedback. With the support of our tech team we try to help developers to get a smooth integration done.

There's one more thing that I would like to add to this. We absolutely understand that you and other developers might need some time for their apps to reach a certain volume of ad impressions per month.

Therefore why don't we start working on this right from the beginning? In our agreement you will see that there is a paragraph giving you a fair amount of time to get the user base required for 1 million ad impressions. So far this has always worked with our partners and not a single one of them had to leave our partnership.

Let's drive this forward and build a great partnership!

Best Regards from Hamburg,
Robert

Smaato Inc.