There is no question that mobile advertising is exploding. Yet, the numbers that are starting to emerge from some of the mobile advertising firms are eye-popping. Mobile advertising company Nexage is serving up eight billion ad impressions per month, a 50% growth over a three-month period from May to July 2011. Those are some serious numbers. The growth comes as more consumers interact with the Web through their mobile devices but also as more publishers and app developers start pushing ads through their mobile platforms.
Nexage is a real-time bidding (RTB) exchange provider. The impressions it serves are through its Nexage Revenue Platform that allows publishers to use its consolidated software developer kit (SDK) to create rich media ads. Nexage has some big clients, but its most influential to date has been a partnership with Rovio to deliver ads to Angry Birds. It also has partners with other premium brands, such as the National Football League and the Associated Press.
Nexage is carving a nice niche for itself in the mobile advertising market. The Angry Birds contract should help drive a significant amount of ad impressions to Nexage as the game has been downloaded 250 million times on platforms across the world.
“This is really just a marker on the road,” said Ernie Cormier, Nexage president and CEO to ReadWriteWeb.
The RTB process is similar to the way that Google manages AdWords and AdSense on the Web. It enables advertisers to bid on sources on an impression-by-impression basis. This includes allowing Demand-Side Platforms, agency trading desks and other RTB ad networks to bid on impressions through a machine-to-machine interface. It servers between 170 – 180 publishers and developers with 600 different properties between them with about 80 different buyers.
“It is a Google market,” Cormier said. “We are able to compete because we scale efficiently and scale well.”
Outside of Google, which serves mobile ads through its acquisition of AdMob, which has been integrated into Google’s mobile AdSense. In the RTB market, Mobclix is a competitor and long-tail sellers like Smaato compete with lesser known developers and publishers.
Eight billion monthly impressions is a lot, but Cormier believes that there is still quite a bit of room to grow.
“It is a huge market, there is quite a bit of head room. From the supply side, we are just now starting to dip our toe in the water,” Cormier said. “We could grow a lot with existing customers by scaling and creating new capabilities for suppliers and bidders.”
Nexage also plans for international expansion. Though it serves ads all around the world, it does not yet have feet on the ground in locations like South America, where Nexage plans on expanding soon.
