Xeno bits, the developer behind Belote WorldTour for Windows Phone, has been taking a look at in-app advertising on the platform. While Windows Phone is still the baby of smartphone operating systems, it does provide developers a few paths to take when it comes to advertising solutions. Xeno bits took a look at Microsoft's Pubcenter, Inneractive and Smaato for revenue from advertisements loaded within their app.
Google's AdMob received no attention due to issues with the SDK having a negative impact on performance. Accumulating over 4,000 downloads, and taking a look at graphs reported by three chosen publisher networks, led Xeno bits to the following conclusion:
- "Smaato will not let you earn much, but at least today they are the only ones from who I received money. Their SDK is pretty good and site is the best I tried so far, especially regarding analytics."
- "Inneractive tools are easy to use, I was easily able to contact their support and they spent some time to help me solve my issues by chat, but I was disappointed by their answer to my displayed ads amounts issue."
- "The Pubcenter SDK is the best for sure, their site not so much (I need to use IE (32bit) version in order to use it). I finally succeed to setup my account in order to be paid at the end of November, as they were opening pubcenter to new countries including mine. But I still have not received any money from them so far... I heard many times that I had to be patient with microsoft (same thing for paid version of my app...)"
What's interesting to note is how low eCPM is on the smaller networks. Smaato reported just $0.075, Inneractive at $0.2, while Microsoft was at a reasonable $0.56. An issue many developers have with Pubcenter is the limited availability. While there have been a few user stories (such as this) being published, it's still a game of which one is best for you, as is the case with general website monetisation. Trial and error.
Read the full report and gander at the pretty graphs over at Xeno bits.
Source: Xeno bits
