Flurry Launches RTB Marketplace For Apps

Mobile-Apps-A

App advertising and analytics firm Flurry has launched its own real-time bidding (RTB) exchange to expand monetization options for publishers in its network. Built into the new Flurry Marketplace is audience data drawn from more than 300,000 apps running across more than 1 billion smartphones and tablets each month.
 
That user data combined with real-time bidding promises to help programmatic buyers better target specific audiences, while increasing the value of inventory for sellers.
 
The new offering reflects the growing adoption of RTB in the mobile ad industry. Jumptap just highlighted the increase in its inventory following the launch of an RTB platform last fall, tapping into mobile ad exchanges, including Mobclix, MoPub, Nexage and Smaato. Separately, Nexage noted in a report last week that the post-holiday season slowdown in ad spending on its mobile RTB marketplace was much shorter than in 2012.
 
Flurry’s RTB offering is part of its AppSpot monetization platform launched in October. AppSpot provides ad-serving, ad network mediation, analytics reporting and other features for ad-supported apps. The company says the thousands of app publishers are already adopted in the Flurry Marketplace, which boasts reach of 300 million unique users and billions of ad requests each month.
 
The exchange allows advertisers to target by age, gender, device, geography, app category, individual app, and users' interests via Flurry Personas. They can also filter out where they don’t want ads to run.
 
Despite the mobile RTB land rush, analysts point out that the market is still at a nascent stage. Speaking at the OMMA Mobile Summit last month, Karsten Wiede, who heads up consumer research at IDC, said a lack of sufficient supply and demand and latency issues have held back expansion of RTB in mobile to date. But he projected that RTB would play a bigger role in the mobile advertising in the next 18 months.
 
IDC has forecast that overall, RTB-based spending worldwide will rise from $1.4 billion in 2011 to $13.9 billion by 2016. In the U.S., RTB was estimated at $1.1 billion in 2011, and projected to reach $8.9 billion by then.

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