Particularly the percent of installs part as opposed to the percent of apps part.
Right now on that metric the top ad networks in order are Admob, then Millennial Media, then Inmobi, then Tapjoy. I use the first three, and have gotten multiple checks from Admob and MM.
One thing to watch is ad fill rates. Millennial Media and Inmobi have decent ad fill rates for certain countries, and poor ones for other. Admob has good fill rates for all countries I have seen. Admob mediation allows you to dole out ads by country, so that you don't send ads to a network with low fill rates for a particular country. Adwhirl is another mediation service owned by Google - it allows for backfill (if one service has no ads, try to load ads from another service). Google wants people to migrate from Adwhirl to Admob mediation, but Admob mediation has no backfill.
I have a number of non-game apps with various fill rates - usually around 1%, give or take 0.5%. I put out some games a few months ago, and their click-through rates were all bad - less than 0.5%. As Admob looks at apps as a whole, this poor performance began pulling down the fill rates of my apps with good CTR. I now just advertise my other apps on (most of) my games.
Really, Admob, MM and Inmobi ruled the field until Tapjoy started breaking out. Tapjoy has an interesting model, which work well with games which offer freemium points and the like. Back when I tried (a few months ago) their SDK install methodology for Android was way behind the simplicity of Admob, MM or Inmobi. Add to this that my games were mostly C++, and that I'd have to re-write them if possible to use a freemium model (otherwise why use Tapjoy, I'd just use one of the other three), I passed on using Tapjoy for now and went on to other things. Others working with other game models seem happier with Tapjoy though. They have to make their install easier though. I don't have time to muck for days with half-assed SDKs when the return on doing so is so uncertain.
Thanks! Great to know your experience with them. I can't edit the original post any longer (Didn't know that you could only edit for X amount of time) but I will try to recompile it all periodically and republish it or put it on a website where I can edit it in-place.
You mention the fill rate was around 1% - this meant that 1% of the time there were ads to display? Isn't that quite low? What should we expect and aim for?
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With regards to mobile ad networks, I've always found this link handy for Android:
http://www.appbrain.com/stats/libraries/ad
Particularly the percent of installs part as opposed to the percent of apps part.
Right now on that metric the top ad networks in order are Admob, then Millennial Media, then Inmobi, then Tapjoy. I use the first three, and have gotten multiple checks from Admob and MM.
One thing to watch is ad fill rates. Millennial Media and Inmobi have decent ad fill rates for certain countries, and poor ones for other. Admob has good fill rates for all countries I have seen. Admob mediation allows you to dole out ads by country, so that you don't send ads to a network with low fill rates for a particular country. Adwhirl is another mediation service owned by Google - it allows for backfill (if one service has no ads, try to load ads from another service). Google wants people to migrate from Adwhirl to Admob mediation, but Admob mediation has no backfill.
I have a number of non-game apps with various fill rates - usually around 1%, give or take 0.5%. I put out some games a few months ago, and their click-through rates were all bad - less than 0.5%. As Admob looks at apps as a whole, this poor performance began pulling down the fill rates of my apps with good CTR. I now just advertise my other apps on (most of) my games.
Really, Admob, MM and Inmobi ruled the field until Tapjoy started breaking out. Tapjoy has an interesting model, which work well with games which offer freemium points and the like. Back when I tried (a few months ago) their SDK install methodology for Android was way behind the simplicity of Admob, MM or Inmobi. Add to this that my games were mostly C++, and that I'd have to re-write them if possible to use a freemium model (otherwise why use Tapjoy, I'd just use one of the other three), I passed on using Tapjoy for now and went on to other things. Others working with other game models seem happier with Tapjoy though. They have to make their install easier though. I don't have time to muck for days with half-assed SDKs when the return on doing so is so uncertain.
Thanks! Great to know your experience with them. I can't edit the original post any longer (Didn't know that you could only edit for X amount of time) but I will try to recompile it all periodically and republish it or put it on a website where I can edit it in-place.
You mention the fill rate was around 1% - this meant that 1% of the time there were ads to display? Isn't that quite low? What should we expect and aim for?