New York City has more than 8,000 public pay phones, most of which are in various stages of decline and decay – but Sidewalk Labs, a company under Google’s Alphabet umbrella, is helping put a plan in motion to revive those aging kiosks. Through a project called LinkNYC, the city’s neglected phone boxes are in […]
Almost every game developer uses rewarded video to monetize because it’s lucrative – but there’s also a lot not to like about it. “A 30-second video ad just isn’t that engaging, and there’s no reason for users not to put their phone down when the video’s playing and just wait for it to end,” said Tayber […]
Ten years ago Axel Springer was a classic print publisher. About 1% of its revenue came from digital. These days, digital revenue tops 70%. It’s been part of what Axel Springer US president Jens Müffelmann calls “a radical transformation” for the German publisher and it was triggered by an unlikely source – circular advertising, long the […]
Apple and Google own the app economy – and that makes distribution and discovery pretty tricky for the average app developer. “These companies … are monopolizing this ecosystem,” said Chris Cunningham, newly minted CRO of beacon and proximity data aggregation company Unacast, speaking at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Mobile Marketplace event on Monday in New York […]
Mobile game publisher I Got Games (IGG) – which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on paid acquisition – was noticing its user retention tank. The culprit? App-install fraud. IGG has 18 million monthly active users evenly distributed across the world, with roughly 40% coming from the Americas, 30% from Europe and 30% from Asia […]
When YP Canada quietly acquired programmatic mobile ad platform JUICE Mobile for $35 million on March 17, its main concern was to assuage any potential investor concerns that the directory and listings behemoth wouldn’t be able to make its debt payments. YP Canada was $1.7 billion in debt and teetering on the brink of bankruptcy […]
The promise of location data is one thing. The undeniable issues around scale and inaccuracy that come along with it are another. “No one disputes that the accuracy and quality of physical data is way below average,” said mobile tech vet Chris Cunningham, who on Wednesday took the reins as CRO of beacon and proximity […]
The messenger app Kik, a chat service catering to teens, debuted its Bot Shop on Monday. The shop lets Kik users download chatbots – automated apps meant to simulate real conversation. The shop currently features 16 bots from companies like Vine, H&M, Funny or Die, The Weather Channel and J-14 (a celebrity mag geared toward […]
A little less than a year ago, Snapchat was still at the beginning stages of working out its advertising strategy. Its ad sales team felt small, at least from the perspective of some agency execs, and unable to keep up with agency and advertiser demand. But in recent months, Snapchat seems to be taking itself […]
The ad industry is still hashing out how to handle the practical implications around desktop viewability, but ready or not, the Media Rating Council released the near-final draft of its mobile viewability standard for public comment on Friday. “I wouldn’t say that everybody is ready for this, but there are numerous people clamoring for standards, and organizations […]
