• by Tyler Loechner  @mp_tyler, June 20, 2014

Less than one year after entering the mobile programmatic space, data platform and app analytics firm Apsalar wants out.

The company announced its exit from the “programmatic media business to focus all development resources on its analytics and audience management platform,” the company wrote in a blog post.

The exit is not shocking -- Apsalar launched four years ago as an in-app analytics company and only recently decided to enter the mobile programmatic space. It took its mobile demand-side platform (DSP) out of beta just under one year ago.

“The roots [of Apsalar] are in the measurement game,” said Dayton Keane, VP of sales and marketing at Apsalar.

Internal discussions surrounding an exit from the mobile DSP space began about four months ago, when Facebook kicked HasOffers and Kontagent from its Mobile Marketing Partner (MMP) program. Keane said that decision by Facebook “really opened up the industry [and] created a ton of opportunities all over again” for Apsalar, which is itself a member of the Facebook MMP.

Keane said that around 15% of Apsalar's revenue came from the DSP, a small amount by his estimate that made the decision to nix the buying platform “easy.”

“It’s not like it was 50% of our revenue,” he quipped.

Nearly al of the company’s headcount and resources were already focused on Apsalar’s measurement offerings, and the few -- four, to be exact -- employees that were focused full-time on programmatic will be repurposed within the company, per Keane.

Despite abandoning its programmatic project less than a year after its inception, Keane made it clear that Apsalar is not exiting the space because it doubts the future of programmatic.

“By no means do we believe that programmatic is not the way of the future,” asserted Keane. “That has nothing to do with our decision.”

He repeatedly mentioned Facebook’s decision to clean up its MMP program as the catalyst behind Apsalar’s decision; they viewed it as a business opportunity to differentiate themselves within the mobile measurement industry and decided to put all of their eggs into one basket. That, coupled with the fact that the mobile DSP space was filled to the brim with options even before Apsalar joined the fray, made it a “no-brainer decision to double down on analytics and measurement,” Keane said.

Apsalar has raised a total of $17 million from investors including DCM, Thomvest Venture, Battery Ventures and DN Capital, including a Series B round of $9 million just one month after it took its mobile DSP out of beta.

Keane claimed the investments were all made into the company’s “core product” -- measurement and analytics -- as that’s where the lion’s share of its customers and revenue come from.

Real-Time Daily reached out to several of Apsalar’s investors for comment but was unable to reach them immediately, or they were unable to comment.