Are you old enough to remember the raucous applause iPhone copy-and-paste received upon its announcement in the spring of 2009? It was the microphone-drop feature of that fall’s iPhone OS 3 update — that’s right, even before it was redubbed “iOS.”
Those were the early days of the smartphone. Apple’s App Store was unleashed only a year prior with all of 500 apps. About 1.6 million apps later — 5.7 million if you include Android and Amazon’s eventual offerings — and it’s become difficult to move a grizzled mobile veteran with the promise of new innovations. Still, it doesn’t mean the entire landscape has been figured out and chiseled in stone. The way mobile apps and games are monetized is still rife with change that is capable of rocking an entire ecosystem — similar to how duplicating text with a few taps did more than a decade ago.
Fundamental changes to privacy protection and the ebbs and flows of consumer attention and global economics have led to seismic shifts in the way apps and games are monetized, namely Chartboost Mediation.
Developer-first
What is Chartboost Mediation? Chartboost Mediation is a developer-first platform that increases revenue with unbiased transparency.
Read that again and let it sink in. The fundamentals are not new. Publishers have long enjoyed the benefits of aggregating demand to drive ad revenue to their games and apps. The Chartboost approach increases revenue by providing access to more than 33 of the premier demand sources in the industry. That includes Google bidding, Meta Audience Network, Zynga, Take-Two, Mintegral, Liftoff Monetize, AdColony, our own Chartboost network, and more. Access to top demand matters when you consider that 70 percent of the top publishers in North America have adopted in-app bidding. Chartboost Mediation is simply the mechanism that opens the floodgates to revenue.
In a sense, that’s the easy part. The real trick is harnessing this power without abusing the trust of your customers. Most mediation platforms operate as black boxes, allowing them to implement self-serving business practices. They prioritize their own demand in a publisher’s prime waterfall positions, effectively taking a percentage of their customer’s most valuable impressions and selling it directly to their advertisers.
At Chartboost, we serve the developer/publisher first.
Chartboost Mediation drives many of the same benefits of our competitors, but what we do differently is offer those benefits at scale while toppling the barriers of trust.
Quite simply, the waterfall mediation model contains biases: historical, personal, and financial. Chartboost Mediation takes the next evolutionary step in ad mediation by tapping multiple demand sources in real time using unified auctions to subvert those biases. Auction requests are sent to every network for real-time bidding (RTB), and the highest-paying qualifying bid wins. Chartboost Mediation leads to higher CPM, fill rates, average revenue per daily active user (ARPDAU), and lifetime value (LTV). Most importantly, it provides the clearest path to open and transparent in-app bidding.
By delivering an unbiased, transparent revenue stream, developers can focus on what matters most: creating highly engaging mobile experiences for app and game users.
Publishers’ next big efficiency
So how did we get here? Eleven years after the humble aspirations of iPhone OS 3 came the privacy shakeup of iOS 14 in 2020. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) put the kibosh on the identifier for advertisers (IDFA). In other words, an app publisher’s ability to track users was so significantly inhibited, the ecosystem as we knew it had to be reimagined.
With in-game ad revenue on pace to hit $63 billion in the next few years, publishers are looking for the next big efficiency. Chartboost Mediation pairs intelligent ad monetization with the best demand sources to offer just that. Publishers get the highest price for every impression post-IDFA and are able to do so without any underlying factors obscured.
Publishers and developers that adapt quickly will be positioned to maintain high monetization. And in the face of fluctuating global economic conditions, they must break out from old habits and test new networks. Chartboost Mediation has already proven to move the needle against the backdrop of economic downturn and geopolitical turmoil.
If it’s good enough for them …
Naturally, the question begs “Why Chartboost Mediation?” If the paradigm shift to unified auctions and Chartboost’s prime directive of transparent service doesn’t move you, consider the close ties we’ve formed with the movers and shakers in the industry — Zynga and Take-Two in particular. Our tools are sharpened to meet the standards of the gaming industry’s most elite publishers and studios. We have built the best-in-class support and expertise to meet the advertising, user acquisition (UA) budget, and spending needs of the best in the business. And all of it is available to you.
If any publisher or developer is concerned about potential biases tipping an advantage toward any particular demand source over another, Chartboost Mediation grants full customer control over prioritization and management of its ad network and demand sources. That means you can have total control over real-time optimizations to ensure the best ad for the user fills every ad slot.
Chartboost Mediation also provides robust data and insights — including user value, session data, and behavioral data — that drive optimizations that make a real impact.
Chartboost Mediation is far from done. Our product roadmap over the next year is packed. The Chartboost offices are electric in anticipation of the strides to come. Our exclusive Google bidding partnership and extraordinary App-ads.txt Verifier last year were just the tip of the iceberg. Stay tuned as we continue to move even the most grizzled mobile monetization veteran with everything Chartboost Mediation has to offer.
It’s not just another copy-and-paste ad mediation solution — sign up for Chartboost Mediation ad mediation today.
