With thousands of applications available across multiple platforms, it’s easy to get lost in the crowd. The Apple App Store alone has over 500,000 applications, with the challenge now for app developers is to get noticed or to get a large number of downloads in order to move up the rankings amongst the sea of apps.
That’s where advertising companies specifically focused on the app developer community come in. Industry trade association CTIA this week announced a rating system for apps that joins previous efforts by advertising companies designed to provide solutions to the discovery challenge. One of those solutions is from AppCarousel, which as the title suggests creates “carousels” of apps grouped by types (i.e. a shopping carousel) or by brand. These groups also contain different media types that consumers can choose to access.
Another player in the space is Smaato, which just opened its new headquarters in San Francisco’s Union Square. Smaato said it recognized the problem of app discovery back in 2005 and developed a mobile advertising optimization platform designed to connect apps with over 70 mobile advertising networks. The platform works across iOS, Android, Windows, BlackBerry, Bada, S60, Qt, WRT and the mobile Web, and also has a reporting tool designed to helps marketers target consumers more effectively. Smaato claims to work with over 40,000 mobile publishers globally.
So what is the future for app developers? The Smaato advertising optimization platform seems to have been successful because of its convenience, as it is essentially an outsourced ads operation service. Plus it is platform agnostic, which is likely to appeal to app developers not wanting to redesign an app from scratch for different platforms. Also with companies such the Financial Times, which relies in a mobile Web presence instead of an application, the Smaato solution still works. All of the bases appear to be covered, which is important in this rapidly changing industry where consumer behavior is difficult to predict.
