It wasn’t so long ago that admob was treading a lonely furrow, pioneering mobile advertising alongside one or two other players.  Now the ecosystem around mobile ads is becoming increasingly sophisticated with the emergence of players in specialist segments such as Rich Media and Android advertising for example.  At the same time the technology-driven acronym-tastic world of DSPs (demand-side platforms) and SSPs (Supply side platforms) has hit mobile as it converges with trends in the wider online advertising space.  In addition, new companies are emerging around ancilliary services such as analytics, mobile ad landing pages and measurement.

With all these changes it can be hard to keep up.  Yesterday’s hot startup can quickly become today’s dull incumbent (hi Admob!) and the hot new thing can seemingly emerge from nowhere.   So here’s a run down of some of the players that are ‘ones to watch’ in mobile advertising during 2012.

Strikead – not the first to try and provide a demand-side platform (mobile media buying across many networks) but perhaps the first with the right timing and sufficient backing to make this kind of ambitious play work.  With a strong management team and having just raised a big investment round these guys are aiming to remove issues such as the fragmented nature of mobile ad buying and becoming the go-to place on the buy side of mobile ads.

Atmio – with google having recently announced that a mobile optimized landing page will affect the quality score on mobile search there’s an obvious signal that there’s going to be a need for services to help create them.  Enter atmio – they offer a WYSIWYG editor that can create many types of professional looking landing pages, for mobile lead generation (capturing email, phone numbers etc), mobile commerce or many other types of ads.  Agencies or other advertisers can get up and running in minutes and what they offer is well ahead of the rest of the pack.  If you buy mobile advertising – get to know!

Distimo –  are a Dutch outfit that started off providing deep analytics into the world of appstores – offering dynamic information across iphone, android and other third party stores.  They are now moving into mobile ads and beginning to offer analytics that can help app developers and brands to understand how effective their mobile advertising is.  With Distimo’s capabilities they are sure to shake up mobile ad analytics, which is still very nascent.

Airpush – with millions of new Android devices out there huge amounts of new advertising inventory on android apps are being created, particularly as the paid-for app market on android has been slower to develop than on the iphone platform.  Airpush provides a mobile ad network specifically for Android and claims to offer much higher CPMs than the generic ad networks that work across iphone, android and mobile web.  Expect to see more of these specialist types of ad networks emerge as the market develops.

Mopub – as more and more ad networks are available, this is creating a need for mobile ad serving solutions that can integrate several ad networks (e.g. for use on different types of inventory) and allow direct ad sales or insertions by publishers/ developers.  The main contender for this role Adwhirl was snapped up by admob early in its existence and promptly left to more or less rot.  However, mobpub has emerged as an alternative option.  Look for these guys to increasingly evolve into an SSP (supply side platform) which a strong position in the value chain as they begin to own the publisher relationship (not the mobile ad networks).

Mobpartner - with all this new mobile ad inventory being created an opportunity for cost per action (CPA) and other performance based advertising is emerging.  The networks simply can’t fill all this mobile inventory on a CPM or CPC basis.  Mobpartner is the old skool player in the mobile affiliate scene but it’s only really now that the market is taking off around them.  With a network of tens of thousands of publishers, a decent technology platform and some strong offers mobpartner are in a good position to be one of the leaders in mobile performance marketing.

Linking Mobile – another exciting player in the mobile affiliate space, this time based in the UK, Linking Mobile are one of the first mobile ad networks to try and link the real world with the affiliate space via mobile.  With innovations such as the launch of QR codes for mobile advertising these guys are pumping out some great innovations.

And finally … who is the the hottest mobile advertising company of 2012?  ….

Well it’s going to be facebook.   With the imminent launch of their HTML5 mobile apps platform facebook are sure to extend their facebook ads program onto mobile.  This will create a vast swathe of new, highly targeted mobile inventory, that benefits from hooking straight into the social graph.  The impact of this is going to be huge and could easily kill of many of current mobile ad networks, who can barely offer any targeting at all, let alone the razor sharp interest-based and demographic targeting of facebook.  However, at the same time, there’s going to be new opportunities for mobile advertising companies building on top of this new facebook mobile ad platform.

Who do you think will be the big mobile advertising companies of 2012?  Let us know in the comments!

Conversions using PPC mobile advertising clicks – Smartphone vs Mobile Network based targeting

With each click costing just 5c this made the campaign ultra profitable – we are talking margins of nearly 100%. So the holy grail of mobile PPC arbitrage is possible, you just need the right targeting. In this case targeting a specific mobile network was better than targeting by handset.  The type of customer particular networks have can be a more attractive audience than that of a particular handset.   These type of targeting issues simply don’t arise in the online world, so there’s clearly plenty of opportunity out there for those (like us) that can get it right!

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User-payment driven models can be very lucrative for hit applications, especially games.  Howevever, there is increasing that application prices are suffering from downward pressure towards free.  New types of payment models such as subscriptions or in-app payments are promising although not all application types are suited to these approaches.

Display advertising can pay the bills on free apps if there is sufficient scale of usage.  Using ad networks like admob or potentially integrating mutliple ad networks using a mobile ad optimizer such as smaato or mobclix can deliver significant revenues for some apps.  However, the growth in mobile inventory, and falling click-through rates mean that it is becoming harder to make this model work.

Affiliate marketing is an alternative revenue stream to user payments and display advertising that is just opening up on mobile and is creating a big opportunity for mobile app developers.  Affiliate marketing is already a major category in the online advertising world and its now moving onto mobile.  Unlike current mobile advertising which is typically sold on a CPM (cost per thousand) or more usually a CPC (cost per click) basis, mobile affiliate programs payout based on a CPA (cost per action) basis in a single payment or a revenue share.  In some cases the payments for particular actions (e.g. in the mobile casino space) can be very high – up to $50 in some cases.  As a result, with the right approach affiliate marketing can be more lucrative for mobile application developers than traditional mobile advertising or mobile payments from users.

A number of players are now offering affiliate programs for iphone apps including William Hill, Offerpal and  Allslots/ Brightshare.  In addition, the iphone appstore affiliate program run by linkshare has also been extended to work on mobile.  Android-compatible affiliate programs are also emerging, taking advantage of the more open nature of the android appstore ecosystem .  Developers on other platforms such as Java, Symbian, Blackberry and mobile web can typically choose from an even greater range of different mobile affiliate programs and networks.

There are also opportunities for application developers to use APIs from online shopping services to build affiliate-revenue driven apps.  For example, apps could be developed for specific dietary requirements around online grocery APIs or to aggregate affiliate feeds from a range of retailers into a single app.

Another approach is to link mobile applications to the massive growth in vouchercodes.  For example, the UK-based vouchercloud iphone app is a mobile-focused way of grabbing a slide of the discount voucher market.  Whereas there is little room for new players on the web, vouchercloud has been able to build significant traction by being the first to market with a high quality voucher-driven iphone app.

Finally, the ability for mobile applications to interact with real world retail stores presents another affiliate marketing opportunity.  Services like the shopsavvy iphone app allow users to scan a product barcode in a store and get pricing information from online suppliers.  The affiliate potential of such applications is potentially enormous.

So – application developers need to look seriously at the opportunities presented by affiliate marketing, and consider this business model right from the intial concept stage in the design process.

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One of the most difficult issues in mobile is promoting your mobile site or application.  Mobile search is still not very effective and appstores are increasingly saturated.  So what’s an independent publisher or developer to do?  Well, historically a key traffic driver for independent sites and apps has been link exchanges but these can be time consuming to set up and it is hard to manage the relationship – how do you know the other party continues to send you sufficient traffic to keep up the link?

Simon Judge is an independent mobile developer and author of the very excellent Mobile Phone Development blog.  Here’s what he’s been working on:

In my spare time, as a hobby activity, I have been working on a mobile link exchange. It allows text links to be placed on mobile web sites or within applications. Each request for ads returns two ads. Showing someone else’s ad gets you a credit for displaying ads on yet someone else’s site or application. So, for every view by your end user, you get up to two ads shown on other sites or applications.

I am looking for a few people to try it out. It works on wml, xhtml, iPhone, Symbian, Android, Blackberry and Windows Mobile. In fact, it’s possible to swap ads on one platform for ads on another. It’s also possible to target ads by country and network operator.

The system supports static mobile web pages, via javascript, where end users have javascript available. Alternatively, I have examples for use from php, cgi (perl), jsp, classic asp, c# (.NET) and vb (.NET). I also have tips how to integrate into the various mobile platforms or use the HTTP GET or POST API.

I’ll post another time on how it was built. I had to think carefully about supporting lots of requests per second as well as serving ads very quickly. I wasn’t able to use CGI (php or perl) nor conventional databases.

Meanwhile, if you are interested in being one of the first people to give it a try, free of charge (the final service will also be free), then please contact me at simon@simonjudge.com explaining who you are and a bit about your mobile site or application.

This sounds like a great project so please drop Simon a line and help to get it off the ground.

2009 has been the year the mobile internet took off, with the game-changing success of the iphone driving forward the entire market.   Mobile handsets have become much more user-friendly for web usage as a result of touch-screens and improved browser technology.  Network operators have finally begun to rollout flat-rate and lower cost mobile data access packages and are investing heavily in marketing mobile internet services to consumers.  The growth in ‘App Stores’ has opened up a new distribution channel for service providers and big brand mobile services like m.facebook.com are attracting mainstream users to the mobile web.

As a result, many people in the affiliate marekting industry are now seeing mobile as The Next Big Thing.  So what are the opportunities in mobile for the casino affilate industry?

Mobile commerce is developing

Whilst mobile internet usage has reached the mass market, commercial transactions have been slower to develop on the mobile platform.  Spending is currently concentrated in mobile-focused areas such as downloads (applications, ringtones, games) with very limited activity in key verticals such as travel, finance and retail.

Despite the massive improvements to mobile user-interfaces there are still barriers preventing mobile commerce from taking off.  For example, financial products such as mortgages or insurance typically involve a lot of researching and from a UI perspective usually require lots of tick-boxes, which are not well suited to a mobile screen.

However, there are some signs that this is beginning to change.  iphone applications are showing that users will purchase goods and services using their mobiles if they are given the right user interface.  For example, Pizza Hut recently announced that it had generated $1m in sales in 3 months from its iphone application.  eBay also began to break out mobile commerce revenues for the first time earlier this year which showed that they are already generating $380m of sales over mobile in H1 2009/10.

Affiliate marketing on mobile is not new

Affilate marketing on the mobile web has been around in some form since the very early days of ‘wap’ with some of the first mobile adult sites developing very basic affiliate systems.  The major ringtone players such as Jamba have also used affiliate marketing heavily to promote their subscription mobile content offerings.  These were promoted mainly on the PC web, driving users to the mobile internet for content delivery.  However, following the consumer and regulatory backlash against these subscription services, the ringtone players have retrenched and are no longer leading innovation in mobile web affiliate marketing.

The Casino sector is now leading the way

As a result of the collapse in the subscription ringtone market, and the slow development of mobile commerce in other sectors, the major mainstream high-value mobile service category is casino gaming.  Consequently, affilliate marketing on mobile is now being lead by casino players in terms of both service development and affiliate technology.   Simon Liss from the Mobile Agency We Love Mobile says, “Mobile affiliate marketing only really works when the deal can be done via the device. The ability of mobile casinos to acquire users and take payment on device means that traffic from third parties is very easy to track and monetise – as a result the casino players are leading the way.”

Specialist Casino Affiliate networks quicker to roll out mobile services

A number of the specialist online casino networks have already moved to develop mobile affiliate offerings.  Typically, services are provided as downloadable applications which provide access to the standard range of casino games including Poker, Bingo, Roulette, Black Jack and Slots.  These mobile applications are linked to a credit card account enabling them to function in a similar way to an online/ PC-based service.  Affiliate payouts are linked to the download of the application (CPA) or spending by a particular user (revenue share).

Some of the casino affiliate networks offering mobile services include:

• Brightshare which offers the All Slots mobile, All Slots iphone and Wild Jack mobile services on an affiliate basis
• Income Access runs affiliate programs for the mfortune and Gold Mobile Casino brands
• Europartners has developed a mobile affiliate program around the Casino Tropez mobile service

Tracking mobile affiliate sales requires different approaches

PC/ online based affiliate services typically track sales using cookies.  However, this approach does not work effectively on mobile.  As a result, affiliate networks need to use alternative approaches such as server-based tracking.  To date the major generalist online affiliate networks (Trade Doubler, Commission Junction, Zanox) have not yet extended much into mobile and the major in-house affiliate APIs such as Amazon also haven’t been adapted for mobile affiliates. However, there are also some mobile-focused affiliate networks emerging that offer a range of programs, including casino:

• Mobpartner is a french mobile affiliate network which operates across a large number of small mobile-web based affiliates
• MPEX is an adult-focused mobile affiliate platform and site building tool that also offers casino services
• Sponsormob is a German mobile ad network which works directly with merchants and advertisers on a CPA basis

Traffic Generation

For affiliates, generating mobile web traffic requires slightly different approach to on the PC-web.  Natural Search/ SEO is not yet effective on mobile, as Google Mobile Search largely ranks sites based on their PC-driven scoring, which provides little any room for mobile-only players to achieve high positions.  As a result, affiliates have to focus on paid traffic generation, but this is not easy as at present, “demand for quality mobile traffic is growing faster than the supply of it” according to Peter Glaeser from the mobile CPA network Sponsormob.

Paid Search

Paid search on the mobile web is effective but there is limited inventory and as a result, CPCs are high, especially for competitive keywords.  The main sources of paid search inventory include:

As promised here’s the presentation I gave at the London Affiliate Conference today – if you’re interested in talking more email james AT mobyaffiliates or reach out on twitter.com/mobyaffiliates