Opera Mediaworks Ad Revenues Hit $145M
- by Ben Frederick @mp_benfred, February 17, 2016
After its parent company Opera ASA was bought by a consortium of Chinese investors, Opera Mediaworks released its earnings report, revealing that the mobile ad platform drove 75% of
Opera ASA’s $193.5 million in total revenues.Opera Mediaworks' global ad revenue grew to $145.5 million, a 40% year-over-year increase in the fourth quarter (53% YoY annually).
This gives Opera Mediaworks the second-largest software development kit (SDK) footprint in the world, with only Google at the top of the heap.
According to a blog post, the major driver of growth was the company’s specific focus on mobile video ads. 60% of the company’s revenue was derived from mobile video.
The company’s U.S. brand sales team was also responsible for much of their new business, bringing in 58 new brands to advertise on Opera’s platform.
The company also saw an 85% growth rate in publishers with a $1 million earnings run rate (a metric that estimates future revenues based on the revenue of the current quarter). Programmatic sales also grew 129% YoY.
Opera Mediaworks brought on Will Kassoy as their new CEO in 2016.
The investors that bought Opera ASA are reportedly interested in the company, largely due to Opera Mediaworks’ success in mobile advertising. Audiences in China tend to be mobile-first or mobile only. The investors offered to buy all the shares of Opera for a total of $1.2 billion, it was reported last week.
So far, Opera Mediaworks has done a supurb job of keeping its ad platform ahead othe curve of declining competiting platforms (that list of long but includes everyone from Millennial Media to iAd). What I see from Opera, and perhaps this is why emerging markets like China are so interested in it, is because the company seems highly focused on where mobile advertising is going. Opera is in that elite league, where I would also place Google, Airpush, Facebook and not many others, that is staying one step ahead of mobile advertising's evolution. And that bodes really well for the companies that can do this. Most can't and fail to offer anything consistently meaningful to advertisers or publishers after a while.