Mobile marketing company Tapjoy has been busy of late. One product the Tapjoy team has been looking forward to is the rollout of their mobile video advertising platform which has been in the works for most of the summer. Today, the announced Tapjoy Videos designed to provide mobile advertisers with the brand building power found on the Web and TV.
The future of mobile advertisements is going to be video. It is a tricky problem to institute but the value of video within apps and the mobile Web far outweighs mobile banner ads. Tapjoy thinks it can be the leader in this growing industry segment but does the new video product have the chops?
TapJoy Videos wants to solve the engagement issue of video advertising. On the Web, most video ads are not viewed to completion. What TapJoy wants to do is incentivize users to watch videos in order to unlock premium content within games and apps. This is not exactly a new tactic but Tapjoy wants to do it at scale, whereas now only a handful of popular applications have this type of advertising.
For advertisers, Tapjoy Videos offers a pay-for-completed-view pricing. That fits right in line with their pay-per-action pricing they set up in February. They hope that makes the platform competitive in terms of price in comparison with other TV or Web video advertisements.
Tapjoy is also taking a page from Hulu. In Hulu, users are often given a choice on which ads they want to see during their show. Tapjoy will also offer this functionality within apps with the hopes of driving up user engagement.
The idea for Tapjoy is to seamlessly embed videos within apps. Inline advertising and incentivized videos have the potential to be far more lucrative for app developers (especially games) than other forms of mobile advertising. The problem will be spreading the wealth. Mobile ad inventory is high, as we have pointed out several times recently in ReadWriteMobile, but there are just too many apps that think they can make money through advertising. Driving engagement, giving users choices and putting video into the crevices of application user experience is all well and fine. But, if Tapjoy cannot convince advertisers to use their videos product for second and third tier apps, the ecosystem that only rewards the top apps will continue.
That is not good for the ecosystem as a whole. There are thousands of app makers that make quality products but by circumstance are destined for the middle of the pack. It is the developer middle class that needs better options for monetization. Can Tapjoy really give them premium options? Will video be it? Let us know in the comments.
