Since Apple’s App Store launched last July, a number of ad networks have emerged that allow iPhone developers to place advertising in their apps so that they can generate revenue, even when an application was initially sold for free. But as the number of ad networks available has increased, developers are being faced with a new problem: once they’ve deployed an application with a certain ad network, it’s tough to switch to a new one. Typically developers have to issue updates to their apps, which can take days or weeks to make it through Apple’s approval process.
Adrollo, a new service that launches today, is looking to help developers make this process more efficient, allowing them to switch between different ad networks on the fly without having to submit a new application to Apple. At launch the service has support for five different ad networks, with more on the way shortly.
After integrating Adrollo into their application, developers can view their current ad setup from the service’s web panel. From there they can specify which ad networks they’d like to rotate between and how often they’d like their ads to appear in their application. Developers can also set up Adrollo to automatically switch between all available ad networks, optimizing CPM rates to ensure that their apps are generating as much revenue as possible (it can also fill an ad unit when the current network runs out of inventory, which can be a problem on popular applications).
AdRollo – Free Your Ads from iPhone Developers on Vimeo.
Adrollo co-founder Sam Yam says that developers can make as much as twice as much money using the optimizations available on the platform. Yam acknowledges that there are a few other options for developers to pull ads from multiple ad networks, but that they come with their own issues. Some services aggregate ads from various networks on the server-side, then send them to the iPhone applications, but Yam says that these typically only support basic ads. Adrollo supports all ads served up by the networks, and also allows developers to include their own ads in their applications (for example, you could place an add for your premium app in the free ‘lite’ version).
Adrollo is going to be available to developers for free. Yam says that the company’s monetization plan is to eventually begin offering its own ad inventory, which will also be deployed through the platform.
foist!
i’ve been getting bad CPMs lately with my free iphone apps on appstore. It’s really difficult to try out new ad networks because that requires a new application update to the appstore. I’m gonna check these guys out–I hope it works
wow that’s quite cool! I will check it out for our next app iteration…
Sweet name.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery?
so its like Right Media Exchange for the iPhone? good idea!
No it’s not an exchange…its an ad aggregator…
Without diving too much into implementation detail, the SDK client library allows app developers to allocate percentages of traffic to any ad network they wish, turn off ad content completely, drive one’s own customized ads–to promote a paid app for example, and even turn on new ad networks _post_ launch. Our client library is a true client side aggregator and thereby offers you the same ad content provided by any individual ad network’s library. Developers essentially have complete on-the-fly control over this ad content space via AdRollo’s developer member section. As any free app developer who monetizes on ads will tell you, it’s very difficult to launch with another ad network because propagating updates to end users with new ad network info is _not_ a trivial task. Thus, it is really difficult to extract oneself out of an ad network that performs horribly after committing to a particular network. Our library removes that frustration element from developers. In fact this effort isn’t driven for monetary purposes–it is driven by iPhone developers to solve a common problem witnessed by us and many iPhone devs as well.
Hey Adrollo Guys,
I like this idea very much and we were currently even looking to build something like this for our own apps.
My concerns however with using your technology are following:
- Do your servers scale?
- How can I be sure that you do not suddenly switch of your service, when it’s free (that happened with another iPhone analytics startup)
- Your website does not have any contact details. Who are you? Your team, location, funding?
As I said. We are currently looking for a thing like this for our apps and would be glad to not have to do it ourselves.
cheers,
Alex
Hi Alex,
Great questions – let me answer all of them for you -
As of this very day, we’re already processing over 2.5 million ad impressions a day (we expect this number to grow significantly starting from today and we won’t have any problems with that!) – we started out as iPhone developers and have a few apps that broke the top 50 and even an app that broke the top 5. We aggressively memcache and have not had any issues yet.
We have financial resources from a number of sources currently (will be disclosed soon hopefully), and considering our own iPhone applications are running on this same platform, we assure you it is not going away. If you are still concerned, the technical implementation behind the service functions as so – even if one day all our servers disappear, ALL the clients in existence with the Adrollo client library installed in them will resort to their cached allocation values (the advantage of a client-side ad platform), so if you set 25% admob, 25% videoegg, 50% quattro, for example, they will forever continue to serve those ads directly from admob, videoegg, and quattro without ever talking to an Adrollo server again. We’ve been extremely careful with failover procedures.
Finally, we’re 3 Stanford grads who are all local to the Palo Alto area and turned down our Google offers (well, at least two of us did) in order to jump into the startup world – we’ve had experience at Ning, McKinsey, and AMD, among other places.
Hope this helps – feel free to email us directly with any more questions! Also, our FAQ page addresses a lot of these questions, too!
http://www.adrollo.com/help
Great – another junky iPhone company to the mix.
Why would I as an ad network want to partner with an ad aggregator that is going to compete for inventory against me? That makes absolutely no sense. This is the same kind of thing that is already out in the market…adinfuse? admarvel? mobclix? If i have the ability to connect to any of these mobile ad networks then I most likely have the ability to control my own ad server – why would I want to deal with some daisy chain unreliable BS.
Techcrunch quit covering college projects!
Hi Mike -
The ad aggregators that you mention (adinfuse, admarvel) are, as the article mentions, server side aggregators that will never be able to support, for example, videoegg ads, which allow in-app video viewing and then transition right back into the app – a much better user-experience than always hitting a static WAP ad that will open up the iphone browser and close your app (what the server side aggregators can provide).
Furthermore, since Adrollo is a superset of all these ad networks, when Admob, for example, launches their new app-exchange program, we will already support it right off the bat – that’s not necessarily true for the server aggregators.
Finally, we’ll have mobclix running in our library soon enough.
And let’s not forget the ability to dynamically create your own custom ads to cross-promote, for example, a paid app through your lite one.
We offer all these features for free.
This is so lame!
You guys’ embedded everyone’s ad library into the SDK!!
WTF, Why would I do this? You guys are giving me overbloated code!
I’d rather just work with the ad networks directly, as opposed to trust you to give me ALL of them!
this looks pretty useful. couldn’t hurt to try it…
You gotta be EFFEN kidding me.. Have fun folks..the library is 3.5 MEGS!
Hi Avi,
That includes the sample code as well as some documentation – after compiling the library into your application, it adds about 100k in size, typical for any in-app ad library.
No it doesn’t.. I’m talking about the .A file..which is your compiled library.. are you even technical?
I can’t wait to see what the ad networks are saying?
What are you going to do, when quattro updates their ad library?
Your entire SDK will have to be updated
I still dont understand why I would include a 3.5 .a file with everyone’s library into my code…
Your website..just shows me impressions..there’s no way you would even know the CPM I am making either!
Avi, if you’d like to carry this discussion further, you can talk to us developers directly at developers@adrollo.com. Flaming on the comment section doesn’t help anyone.
That aside, let me try to answer your questions right off the bat:
“are you even technical?”
yes. we are.
“when [an ad network] updates their ad library?”
Our app developers will give us the latest library and we’ll integrate the latest. You’ll have to integrate the ad network’s library anyway when you’re restricted to just one ad network, why not one integrate AdRollo, which offers you everything you need?
“why I would include a 3.5 .a file with everyone’s library ”
The 3.5 meg library file that is linked during compile time does not translate to a bigger executable binary after compilation. In fact, all of the frameworks you integrate are _much_ bigger in size than our library but the resulting binary doesn’t reflect the framework sizes… Which begs the question about who’s technical.
Hi Avi,
All the co-founders on the team are technical, but want to address your question directly -
the 3.5 meg library file that is linked during compile time does not translate to a bigger executable binary after compilation. In fact, all the frameworks developers typically integrate are **much** bigger in size than our library (some exceed 100 megs), but the resulting binrary doesn’t reflect the framework sizes.
Also, as will be the case if you did not use the adrollo ad solution, it’s easy to integrate in the ad networks’ latest libraries into adrollo and push out that update. We’ll be making sure this process is kept up to date and as seamless as possible.
Hoping that you’ll give our ad solution a try and really see how useful it is!
Also, if you have any more technical questions, would love to take this off-line.
You can email me directly at syam AT cs.stanford.edu
Actually I hate the phrase “take this offline” as it doesn’t even make sense in this context with emailing.
Just email me =P
Sam-
Alrite, So I have to update ad rollow library to integrate the new ad library, everytime another ad update comes on board.
I still don’t understand how you are going to optimize my ads beyond just impressions. You don’t have access to CPM/Revenue information!
Sam-
Alrite, So I have to update ad rollow library to integrate the new ad library, everytime another ad update comes on board.
I still don’t understand how you are going to optimize my ads beyond just impressions. You don’t have access to CPM/Revenue information!
Is this legal? Having integrated with many of the ad networks that AdRollo claims to support, I’m concerned about their inclusion of other companies’ IP within their own SDK. I’m not a lawyer, but this is very concerning to me.
Also, why isn’t there any corporate info on their website to validate the legitimacy of this company?
AH.. i just realized. It was April fools when this story was published
I just signed up -
It’s sorta pointless since you can’t just use the ad libraries of any of these ad networks unless you sign up for accounts with them.
Why bother to use this library at all?
Hi Aaron,
Yes, you do need to sign up with the various ad networks in order to use their libraries, but the advantage of Adrollo is not to bypass the signup process, but rather to be able to dynamically change which ads you’re serving.
No, I think they’re a legitimate company since I registered and downloaded their sample code and SDK. What’s with all of this hate–are you guys competitors to AdRollo or jealous or something? Maybe it’s just me, but these guys are doing us iPhone developers a favor. Also, I ran the sample code and it’s pretty interesting to see how this works, and how it can possibly work for my apps. Now I just need to talk to these ad networks and obtain application keys so that I can drive down some traffic.
This company is definitely going to go through some serious legal issues.
Good luck Stanford Kids!
What is AdRollo:
1. They have integrated alot of other iphone libraries into an Uber-Library, without asking for their permission.
2. They track impressions of ads. They dont track anything else, no CPMs or any other rubbish they claim to.
From a successful iPhone Developer, to you out there. If you wanted to use analytics or advertising go directly to the sources, don’t bother with a Jack of All Trades Library that just includes everything.
I have a suggestion Stanford Students.. why don’t you go in and actually do a review of all the analytics and advertising iPhone Companies out there and put a stand as to what you recommend developers to use, instead of offering a library with all the crap in it?
Take a stand, instead of wasting everyone’s time.
Hi Avi, I’m not sure what your agenda is, but I’ve reached out to you to email me and you insist on only posting your questions here in the techcrunch comments section.
As I mentioned above, we’re also iPhone developers, who have had a few apps break the top 50 and even an app break the top 5, and we’ve found this ad solution to be extremely useful, which is part of the reason why we continued to expand and build out the service.
We are talking to ad networks directly, and currently our model is to have the integration done directly in the library, but it is an absolutely trivial change for us to entirely abstract out the Adrollo ad swapping logic out from the ad network library integration such that developers do their own integration for every library they anticipate using. Of course, this just hurts both ad networks and developers at the end of the day, but we’re open to this solution for specific networks and have not had to go down this route yet.
At the end of the day, we really just want this platform out there so that the mobile ad market can finally be truly competitive, which will only be a good thing for iPhone developers (increasing market size), and consequently the ad networks, too.
WOW. Lots of excitement surrounding this article. Had one question. We’ve integrated DoubleClick so that we can sell ads directly, serve our own house ads, and connect to ad networks.
I’m guessing AdRollo isn’t a fit for our scenario…would you agree?