Mobile advertising platform Nexage is releasing a private exchange to enable premium publishers and developers to optimize advertising that best fits their businesses. Nexage believes it can help premium publishers make the most money off their mobile apps and games and by taking first-party publishing data and making it available to advertisers to help broaden the targeting and reach of its real-time-bidding platform.
Nexage’s private exchange is about monetizing app data straight from the publisher. The company’s goal is to make advertising the dominant form of application monetization by the end of 2012. Yet, Nexage is only shooting for the large publishers (it has Rovio’s business for ads in Angry Birds) meaning that the app publisher middle class will not be able to benefit from Nexage’s private exchange.
The real-time-bidding exhange (RTB) will allow publishers to take advantage of dynamic price floors to optimize performance and screen ads that are being served to manage brand safety. For instance, a family oriented game probably does not want advertising for Cialis popping up without warning.
The Nexage Exchange has grown from 8 billion monthly impressions in August to more than 12 billion impressions as of this week. It has liquidity for more than 200 publishers and 125 demand resources. Bid volumes on the exchange are growing at 71% per month and revenues are growing along with the bid at 70% per month.
What this all means is that advertising is starting to become a viable source of revenue for premium publishers. Nexage defines premium publishers as those that do more than 10 million ad impressions a month (with exceptions). The company told ReadWriteMobile that there will be an announcement in early 2012 for a advertising vertical designed to help monetize the application and developer middle class. The private exchange is not the answer for the middling developers of the world.
The nature of an RTB platform is that there is no real notion of lost inventory. Nexage does not deal with the long tail of mobile advertising. Hence, fill rates are not a concern to the company. Nexage sees mobile advertising moving the way of the exchange, giving buyers the chance to bid on the ads that appear on their platform. Web advertisers are familiar with this concept as it is basically what Google has built its empire upon with AdWords and AdSense. Google serves mobile ads through its AdMob arm. In September, Google announced that it was separating its mobile advertising and Web advertising arms so that AdMob would be purely focused on mobile while AdSense remained a Web property.
“I do think this marks an important point of maturation for the industry, especially as it catalyzes premium publishers that have to work through how to (safely) scale and manage integrated channels with their direct sales force,” said Victor Milligan, the chief marketing officer at Nexage.