In-App Banner Ads Are Here With Latest Chartboost SDKs

With the latest SDK versions for iOS and Android, Chartboost is excited to announce the support of a new mobile app ad format: banner ads.Banners have existed since the early days of digital advertising but they have fresh potential in mobile apps. A clear example is how hyper-casual mobile game developers have unlocked new possibilities for the format as a complementary placement to the full-screen ad units.In this post, we'll explain the details of in-app banners as well as the other changes coming with the latest SDK updates.

Why in-app banner ads never went away

Since the beginnings of in-game advertising, banners have never been as popular as rewarded or interstitial ads ? they have been criticized for generating accidental clicks or disrupting gameplay. However, the rise of highly polished casual gaming, with thoughtful ad placement, has changed the perception of banners.Today, in-app banners are commonly found in gaming apps such as casual games, as well as non-game apps in categories like music and news. The common element in these apps is typically a well-defined play space, in which banners are unlikely to distract players or cause accidental taps. Developers who thoughtfully design their banner placements can expect good user reception to the format.

Banner ads popular among both performance and brand buyers

Banners have been criticized for low engagement, also called ''banner blindness'', where the user sees the banner but doesn't take notice. While it is true that banners typically have lower click-through rates, they have evolved to being a rich media ad unit that is more interactive, and ''lower engagement'' is now a feature, rather than a flaw.Brand advertisers choose to advertise with in-app banner ads, because of their focus on impressions over installs. By integrating banner with more brand demand, you can now display more brand ads and fewer ads from competing games.Performance marketers and user acquisition managers choose banner ads as well because they are cheaper than rewarded and interstitials and still make a good option in achieving their goals.With Chartboost in-app banner ads, expect demand from both our performance and brand buyers through our exchange such as OpenX, Rubicon Project, Liftoff, Jampp, Appreciate and more. Find a full list of our exchange partners here.

Earn additional revenue with banner ads

In Chartboost's open beta for testing banner ads, we've found the average eCPMs ranging from $0.75 to $1.28 and all the way up to $3 eCPM, depending on geo and platform. Also, when asking a few of our casual game developers we previously found that banners accounted for up to 20 percent of revenue for those who use them, just behind rewarded ads at 30 percent.Chartboost?s new banner ad format follows the programmatic MRAID standards, an API that standardizes ad development across app environments and allows for behaviors like expanding for rich functionality and changing size making them more interactive than before. Banners typically sit at the bottom or top of the screen with the size 320x50 on smartphones, or 728x90 on tablets. A middle screen placement is also possible, with a 300x250 size. The banner ad will be automatically refreshed every 30 seconds, and multiple banners can be displayed at once if desired.

What else changed in the latest SDKs? Here are a few of the top improvements (for a full list of release notes: iOS | Android):

Android SDK 8.0.1 - fully supports Android X

Improvements:

• 8.0.1 brings changes to public API and integration specifications where no SDK file is needed to be downloaded anymore.
• Chartboost can now work with just an application context, instead of a full activity reference.
• Activity lifecycle callbacks are no longer needed for Chartboost to work.

Fixes:

• Fixed bug that prevented configuration, attribution and content prefetch requests from being performed in some cases.
• Fixed crashes during ad display and improved ANR issues.

Notes:

• The Chartboost Android SDK 8.0.1 fully supports Android X.
• The Chartboost Android SDK now requires API level 21 (Android OS 5.0) or higher.
• Chartboost Sample App is available.
• Mediation adapters are coming soon. See this page for supported SDK versions.

iOS SDK 8.1 - can be used via multiple mediations in the same app

Improvements:

• New SDK API for interstitial and rewarded ads: CHBInterstitial and CHBRewarded.
• Chartboost can now be used via multiple mediations in the same app, as long as they use these new APIs.
• Every ad has now its own delegate, and will hide the status bar automatically when shown if View Controller-based status bar appearance is enabled.
• SDK initialization is now immediate in most cases (for both the new and the deprecated initialization methods).
• New APIs for caching an ad using a Chartboost OpenRTB bid response.

Fixes:

• If an ad is automatically dismissed right after clicked, the didClick delegate method is called before didDismiss now.

Notes:

• Mediation adapters are coming soon. See this page for supported SDK versions.

Integrate our latest SDKs iOS 8.1 | Android 8.0.1 and start monetizing with banner ads today!