Mobile Ads, Native Ads Landscape

As I discussed in last blog post, lot of folks are trying to monetize native app investments. Back in the early days app developers used Banner Ads to make some money to monetize apps. But as expected, banner ads are so bad on mobile, it completely defeats whole idea why someone developed native app in the first place.

So, second generation ad-tech came up with notion of "native-ads". Lot of companies were born and provided SDK to embed native ads in the app and ad networks served the content.

Recent market studies have shown, that is not siting very well with the user as ad-blocking is increasing at very high rates. Problem here is, these ads are not personal or relevant or context aware and also generating lot of false clicks.  Reason why it is that way is simple, there is not whole lot of native mobile inventory in ad-networks(partly it is hard to generate that inventory).

So, I am of the opinion that, whole Mobile Ad industry need to re-think, how it keeps interest of user, since user is the king here, who is deciding which app lives on their phone. On of the  strategy that could work ok to is to make the native ads it look like native content with purpose and relevant to that user.

So, that should lead to more collaboration between Apps. if user wins, apps win and marketers win.