It's important for engineers to optimize for speed as much as possible. By solving performance problems, we can ensure advertisers don’t miss out on auctions and that publishers receive the bids needed to maximize revenue. The speed of our platform is crucial in making these auctions happen, which is why we closely monitor our elastic load balancing (ELB) surge queue. We want to share how we recently remedied capacity issues after noticing a case with an unusually high surge queue length.

David Ruggiero
Senior Manager, Business Development in Supply

As a Senior Business Development Manager at Smaato, David is responsible for finding new publishers and helping them monetize their apps via the Smaato platform. Originally from Australia, David has a decade of sales experience across many industries in both Australia and Germany. He moved to Hamburg five years ago and joined Smaato’s Business Development team in 2016.

The mobile advertising industry saw significant growth in the first half of 2018. However, the defining factor of H1 2018 for the digital sphere was undoubtedly the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). In order to understand just how widely the GDPR impacted mobile advertising, we analyzed the relevant traffic across the Smaato platform in our latest Global Trends in Mobile Advertising report and uncovered the effects this regulation had on mobile ad spending and eCPMs.

In-app consent requirements are about to get a fresh makeover. In January 2017, the European Union (EU) proposed the ePrivacy Regulation to replace the ePrivacy Directive. Experts anticipate its passage in 2019 or 2020 and there will likely be a year-long transition phase before taking effect. Unless amended, the ePrivacy Regulation will impose broader opt-in consent requirements on publishers with EU-based end-users.

Diwali is the most widely celebrated festival in the Indian community. Commonly termed Festival of Lights, Diwali begins on November 7 this year and spans over five days. During Diwali, people are typically decked out in new clothes, while houses are cleaned and decorated with colorful lights and lamps. It is also a time where families bond and connect with each other — often by using their mobile phones. 

The first half of 2018 was a time of significant change for the mobile advertising industry — especially in the wake of the new European data privacy regulation, GDPR. Our newly-released Global Trends in Mobile Advertising report analyzes the ad requests and impressions from the Smaato platform in H1 2018 in order to identify the latest mobile advertising trends, including how the GDPR has affected mobile ad spending behavior.

Viewability is an ongoing concern for advertisers, and for good reason. Knowing that ads are actually being viewed by users is the cornerstone of any successful campaign. With that in mind, we are making it easy for advertisers to find the inventory with the highest in-app ad viewability rates on our platform. We do this by allowing advertisers to directly target inventory that has been analyzed using Moat, the leading independent mobile viewability measurement provider.

News apps are an advertiser's dream. They have high reach, engaged readers with above-average salaries, and most importantly they offer a brand-safe environment. Because of this, advertisers are willing to pay a premium to reach this audience. 

How much exactly are advertisers willing to pay? On the Smaato platform, the average eCPM for news apps is 44% higher than the overall average. With such high rates, building a strong monetization plan around an app is a big opportunity for news companies of all sizes. Here are our four tips to help maximize news app revenue:

We are making it easier than ever to ensure that our partners' mobile advertising campaigns are reaching their desired audiences at the right time with a new precision targeting feature: Pre-Packaged Deals.

Last year, Smaato released Open Deals, which are curated whitelists of apps that enable demand partners to purchase verified end-user inventory deals, saving time and effort in searching and selecting the most accurate targeting options. Now, after a successful testing phase, we are very happy to introduce Pre-Packaged Deals, the newest targeting feature within the Smaato Demand Platform (SDX). These professionally-curated, brand-safe inventory packages, now available in SDX, make precision targeting easy — just browse, select, click, and go!

When embarking on the journey of developing a mobile game, the topic that every app developer has on their mind is monetization. How will this game make money?! Creating games isn’t cheap and with the majority of mobile games on the market being free, developers are having to turn to alternative mobile game monetization strategies outside of just selling access to their product.

In-game advertising is one of the most straightforward ways to quickly begin generating revenue from your mobile game. With a variety of ad formats and sizes, it is easy to build a custom in-app advertising strategy that fits both to your game and your business goals. To get you started, here are our top tips for creating an effective mobile game monetization strategy.