Fair Ad Mediation: How WAVE Will Give Power Back to App Publishers

Recent eCPM drops in mobile advertising have resulted in revenue instability for several verticals on both iOS and Android platforms. Those especially affected are heavily dependent on in-app ads – such as mobile games. Publishers must therefore rethink the way they monetize their apps, to diversify their monetization stack or adjust their strategy.

The one constant and core element of many publishers’ ad stack over the years has been their ad mediation platform. But by working with these platforms, publishers have been relying on a black box to bring them money, while paying nontransparent substantial revenue fees to their ad partners. 

If you’re an app publisher monetizing with an ad mediation platform, ask yourself these questions.

Do You Have Control over Your Ad Revenue?

Publishers can currently never be sure whether they are reaching their true revenue potential. That’s because major monetization networks take between 30 percent and 70 percent of the advertising revenue generated from a publisher’s inventory – without disclosing this to the publisher in the vast majority of cases.

adjoe’s general hypothesis is: The average difference between the advertiser’s bid and the publisher‘s net eCPM is 50 percent. This is based on various testing we carried out on supply paths by leveraging adjoe’s direct demand as well as supply inventory from our applike group sister companies Sunday and justDice. 

In response to this hypothesis, adjoe designed and built its fair ad mediation platform WAVE – still in its closed beta phase and only available to five beta test publishers at the moment. The product will prevent this very revenue loss.

WAVE is an ad mediation solution with a zero-percent revenue sharing model that connects publishers to adjoe’s own direct demand. There is no revenue taken at the ad network level, and publishers can grow their ad revenue, ARPDAU, and LTV by more than 50 percent due to higher eCPMs. 

Along with this significant revenue uplift, publishers also benefit from the following: 

• adjoe’s high bids and fierce competition between global direct demand sources triggered by these bids
• First-price and bidding-only auctions; adjoe has no advantage of winning the auction (as it doesn’t make money on its ad revenue) 
• Greater transparency with ad monetization partners

Do You Know About the Conflict of Interest?

Adtech is crowded and loud; only a few big names dominate the mediation market. We all know that these giants market their mediation solutions to publishers as “free.” But this is where the black box of nontransparency begins. 

The companies offering free ad mediation also own leading ad networks, whose demand is connected with their mediation platform. They generate money from these ad networks through revenue sharing. In other words, they make money when they sell publishers’ inventory to their own advertisers. 

By prioritizing ad providers’ margins over publishers’, mediation platform providers create a conflict of interest between their platform and their partner publishers. 

If someone makes more money by winning a higher share of the auction, ad mediation providers can run a biased auction while giving themselves an unfair advantage – for example, by leveraging available data to optimize their own demand or bidder. This even allows publishers to onboard their own demand, since there is no bias on which ad wins the auction.

Have You Integrated a Fair Ad Mediation Solution?

A zero-percent revenue-sharing model for adjoe’s own demand means that bids for the ad space are naturally higher – not only adjoe’s bids but also bids from all other demand partners. Higher bids – higher CPMs – coming from adjoe’s direct demand sources heat up auction pressure for the other bidders in the auction and promote fair competition among all demand sources. 

When we say “fair” we mean that other players will have to reduce their cut of the bid price in order to compete to win the available ad space. That is, unless they are able to have truly unique demand or user data feeding into their bidding algorithms, allowing them to make higher margins on their campaigns. The auction on adjoe WAVE, fueled by adjoe zero-percent revenue share demand, makes artificially set floor prices redundant.

While WAVE will give publishers full control of their inventories and ad revenue, the highest bid always will win the auction, and publishers will always earn the maximum-possible revenue. They will never lose out on higher bids and will never be left wondering “What if?” 

And if there are “What ifs,” third-party auditing firms will confirm we deliver on our zero-revenue-sharing promise. Rest assured, adjoe will put this in print in its contracts with partners.

WAVE Mediation: What’s the Catch?

Maximum ad revenue, greater transparency, greater access to adjoe’s premium direct demand – this is what WAVE aims to promise to app publishers. But what does adjoe have to gain? 

It’s simple: 

• adjoe will ask for a five-percent bidding fee from demand sources who join the auction to cover the technical costs. Publishers therefore will not need to pay for server or cloud costs.
• Publishers who use WAVE as their ad mediation platform will pay adjoe a small SaaS fee (as printed in our partner contracts) – a cost that is easily justifiable when they begin to see significant revenue uplift.

Once it’s officially launched, publishers can join the movement to generate greater transparency to adtech – while also generating maximum revenue from their ad inventory. This fair ad mediation platform is just an email away: talk to adjoe’s team via wave@adjoe.io to receive regular product updates.