• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, July 17, 2014

As the population of smartphone owners grows in emerging markets, so does the opportunity for app developers to recruit new users. It also means more business for mobile ad networks selling app install ads in those markets.

In that vein, China-based mobile ad firm AppFlood released data Thursday showing app install rates (per campaign) continued to rise in the second quarter across Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia.
 
Install rates in those markets are now in the range of 2% to 3%, though well below the 6.07% in North America, and 3.73% in Western Europe, in the second quarter, AppFlood also reported that Asia and the Middle East for the first time accounted for nearly half (47%) of mobile installs for the first time in the quarter.
 
That partly reflects that more than half (53%) of the ad network’s traffic came from those two regions. China is driving much of the increased activity in Asia as well as globally. Without providing dollar figures, AppFlood said average mobile ad spend in the second quarter more than doubled (up 123%) from the prior quarter. By comparison, the average spend in the U.S. slowed to an increase of 66%.
 
Mobile ad spend per advertisers overall grew 19.1% monthly, on average, between July 2013 and Jun 2014.
 
Chinese advertisers are also pushing heavily into other emerging markets. China’s spending quarter-over-quarter increased by triple digits in the Middle East, Asia and Latin America, as well as in North America. By contrast, spend by U.S. advertisers grew just 10% globally.
 
Among Chinese advertisers, much of the spending is tied to the promotion of productivity apps. That was the largest Android app category overall in the quarter in terms of ad spend, followed, by personalization, communication and “tools” apps. The most popular apps in China included WeChat, QQ2013 (messaging) and Taobao (shopping).
 
AppFlood in April began rolling out a real-time bidding (RTB) exchange and demand-side platform to bolster its existing mobile ad network. The company says it now serves 300 million impressions across 82,000 apps. Its ad network reaches 145 million users and serves 100,000 daily installs. AppFlood parent company PapayaMobile, headquartered in Beijing, with offices in San Francisco and London, was founded by ex-Google executive Si Shen.