Apps are the current market buzzword esp. with explosive smart phone sales.
A developer can earn some side income by releasing value add apps for free and integrating a small ad. A few learnings on ad revenue so far(more to come)
- You can generate better revenue if your ad request are filled (fill rate) and eCPM($ earned per thousand impression) will be improved.
- Ad networks use some algorithm to decide if it has to serve the ad or not which impact the fill rate.
- I think if the click through is high, then that will impact the fill rate, etc
- The aim should be to improve the fill rate
- To increase your fill rate, you would need to integrate with serveral ad networks (admob does it behind the scenes, millenial media does provide integration with just a few networks, but still their fill rate is quite low)
- Adwhirl can be a good option to increase fill rate and reduce dependency on one single ad provider.
-Adwhirl is an opensource ad integration library which fills this gap of using multiple ad service networks for the
same banner. It is a one stop shop to integrate most of the ad networks. Moreover it is opensource, hence you
can virtually implement any ad network.
- % of ad to be served can be controlled in their site(this is retrieved using their free mediation server. How nice of them, it is all for free :) )
Gotchas:
1. Adwhirl needs other ad service provider libraries in the class path.
2. Adsense needs additional parameters like company name, app name etc.
3. A mediation server is run by adwhirl.com for free which provides configuration (about what % of ad service to use etc). You can optionally run your own server if required
4. Adwhirl is a loosely couple integration and relies on third party libraries, so have to test that the ad is served individually.
