List Of Top Ad Networks, Categories And Ad Formats.
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A Mobile Ad Network function is to serve a middle point between these two ends of the value chain, moving inventory across both supply and demand, either directly or via reselling or re-broking of inventory.
On some occasions, companies register with an ad network as both advertiser and publisher. Such double registration allows these companies to account traffic it generates as a publisher to cover fees it needs to pay for traffic it acquires as an advertiser.
Ad networks involvement into advertiser – publisher dynamics isn’t always limited with mobile traffic delivery and providing performance stats, sometimes, when advertisers budget is high, ad networks get involved into ad creatives production. For instance, in a case of video ads, that today run supreme of digital advertising efficiency, ad networks can substantially improve advertiser’s ad campaign efficiency and increase its revenue.
The pioneer in the mobile ad networks space was AdMob , that really took off after its acquisition in 2009 by Google, Inc. Over the course of more than 10 years since, the advertising networks space has grown with a small number of top tier companies have been controlling the market. Apart from AdMob by Google, which later become part of the Google Ads ad platform, these are Facebook, Twitter and, in a smaller degree, Snapchat and Pinterest. The paramount advantage that allows these companies to occupy the top tier of the mobile ad market is how much data they can accumulate on their registered users and leverage this data for ad campaigns precise targeting.
Now, the recent newcomers Reddit and TikTok present an interesting case. The former has one of the most diverse online communities on the planet to reach and monetize and the latter is the brand new China-based social media that is like no other US counterpart. Both are worth of advertisers attention as an alternatives (or extra options) to Facebook and Google.
The next tier, that has survived competition with aforementioned companies and continues to compete for mobile advertisers budgets, consists of Applovin, UnityAds, ironSource and Vungle. Compared with the Google and Facebook duopoly, these four have much less data points for a mobile user profile and therefore can not target mobile ads as precise as the top tier companies. To partly negate this limitation and help advertisers achieve their goals, these companies provide account managers to handle low-level ad campaigns management.
One of the most profound shifts in the mobile ad industry is that mobile apps have become the major inventory for ads to be displayed in, replacing traditional mobile web. This shift has even coined a new term – in app advertising. There is a simple reason behind this transition – multiple researches demonstrate that people spend most of the time with mobile devices, using apps, not browsing web sites as they used to. With the number of mobile apps that continues to increase exponentially, mobile in app advertisements have a potential to replace mobile web ads completely. Today all highest paying mobile ad networks are laser focused on mobile as the fastest growing digital advertising sector.
As mobile advertising industry continues to grow, it becomes more and more apparent that moving all operations into programmatic area is the only way to go. This is how you can accommodate greater and greater advertising volumes, allow ever increasing number of advertisers to manage their ad campaigns efficiently and mobile publishers to maximize their inventory monetization.
The downside of the programmatic approach is that it produces lower engagement rates, introduces advertisers to risk of a fraud, generally it’s less relevant compared to manual ad campaigns and can even be harmful for brands in cases when their ads occasionally being placed on websites next to questionable content.
Continue the trend on advertising automation, Artificial Intelligence algorithms are praised as the way to tackle multiple challenges that digital advertising faces. In fact, AI is the technology that many industries embrace to handle big data volumes to search for patterns and valuable insights to increase its efficiency. For mobile advertising it is also a brand new way to better fight off mobile ad fraud.
Speaking of mobile ad fraud, according to Jupiter research this year it’s the advertisers fate to loose $42 billion because of a fraud. There are two kinds of digital ad fraud – technical and compliance one. The first one covers all sorts of technical ways to trick ad network into considering fake advertising events as genuine ones and the second covers multiple tactics to break the rules established on a specific advertising platform. Examples of technical fraud are ad stacking, attribution fraud, faked postbacks. The compliance fraud has to do with viewability, cases of placing ads in areas it rarely can be seen but still reported as seen, tricking users into clicking on ads, re-brokering ad offers from one publisher to another and more.
Table of Contents
Mobile Advertising Business models
Mobile Ad Formats
Mobile Advertising rankings
List of best mobile ad networks
Now, before we’ll start profiling top mobile ad networks, let’s define several characteristics to describe a mobile ad network.
All mobile ad networks provide users with several types of business models to run ad campaigns with. There are 5 major types – CPM, CPC, CPI, CPA and CPV.
With CPM (cost-per-mile) type, an advertiser is charged each time her or his ads are shown 1,000 times (so-called ‘a mile’). It’s the best business model for publishers, because it allows to make money every time an ad was displayed. If they have a stable predictable traffic, it allows publishers to forecast their revenue. The down side is that they may loose some extra revenue, if their app or website audience is really interested in a product or service they advertise. For that case CPC model would allow them to make more money.
With CPC (cost-per-click) model an advertiser is charged for each click made on her or his mobile ads. This model works better for advertisers, because it allows them to pay only for instances when an interest to their product or service is explicit (their ads were clicked) and, as mentioned above, in some cases may work for publishers as well. For a publisher this model always presents a certain risk of him serving lots of ad impressions for free.
CPI (cost-per-install) model implies that advertisers are charged only when a click on their ads resulted into an actual mobile app install. It’s a specific case of a more generic CPC business model. Cost-per-install price has become one of the most important metrics for mobile app marketers to measure and keep track of, because essentially it represents a price they pay to acquire customers and hence it should be factor into ROI calculations.
CPA (cost-per-action) type is more advanced version of CPI, when an advertiser is charged for specific action (in-app sale, subscription, form submit, sign up and more) users take inside an app that is advertised on a mobile ad network. This type of a business model presents more opportunities for publishers to monetize their inventory on one hand and more options for advertisers to grow their business on the other.
And finally CPV (cost-per-view) type is applicable to mobile ad networks that provide advertisers with video ad campaigns. With this model, advertisers are charged for each instance their video mobile ad was viewed. With the current pace of a video advertising growth, this model becomes more and more popular.
Mobile Ad Formats
There are 5 major formats supported by top mobile ad networks – interstitial, banner ads, native ads, video ads and offer wall.
Interstitial ads
A full screen ads that cover the interface of their host application. This mobile ad format is most frequently used to display an ad between different app screens and it’s quite often displayed between different levels in a mobile game app.
Banner ads
A classical static or animated image ad, which is placed inside an app’s interface. Such ad may advertise a third party product, other digital or physical goods, as well as an option to expand an app’s functionality.
Native ads
Either a banner image or video ad that matches the form and function of the app interface it’s displayed in. The core concept of native ads to mimic an app’s interface to be least intrusive compared to other ad formats.
OfferWall ads
It is an ad unit within a mobile app that provides end users with lots of offers to engage with. The most frequent use case is mobile games, where offerwalls may either advertise third party games or a series of games from the same game developer.
Video ads
Video ads consist of a short, usually up-to 60 seconds, video clip to advertise products and services. This mobile ad format is most often used within media apps. There are two major types of video ads – in-stream and out-stream. With in-stream type, video ads are displayed full-screen before, after and within video content that is streamed inside an app. With out-stream type video ads are displayed on a web page, displayed inside a mobile app.
Mobile Ads Reporting
An advertising campaign performance data reporting is one of the key components that is crucial for its success. This information is provided by mobile ad networks to advertisers via an online dashboard. It includes data on such parameters of ads performance as number of impressions, clicks, installs, video ad views, platform, country, ad format and so on.
Mobile Ads Targeting
There are number of parameters that allow to narrow down a mobile ad campaign reach to a specific audience. These parameters are called targeting options, there are a number of such options but the majors are the following:
Geo
It allows to narrow down an ad campaign within a specific country or region. It enables mobile marketers to advertise a product or service that is relevant only within a specific region.
Device
It allows to show ads on specific models of mobile devices only. This type of targeting lets advertisers to display ads on devices with a specific screen size and other hardware requirements, which allows to avoid a mobile ad experience degradation.
Carrier
With this option, it’s possible to show ads only to mobile users, who are served by a specific mobile carrier. It presents advertisers an opportunity to display ads to mobile users, those mobile carrier provides a better mobile signal reception in a specific area.
OS
it allows to show ads on mobile devices running specific operating system or even particular versions of OS. It gives advertisers a benefit of displaying ads to mobile users on devices that are best to display those ads software wise.
Another company that provides data to measure mobile ad networks performance is Singular – the mobile marketing analytics platform that issued earlier this year the Singular ROI Index. It’s compiled based on the data Singular derived from more than 550+ mobile media sources, 2.2 billion installs with matching ROI, $6.3 billion in advertising spend. The index factors in a number of metrics, such as mobile user retention, revenue per install and what is the most important – the cost to drive app users engagement.
Now let’s take a look at the list of top mobile ad networks of 2022 we’ve compiled for app developers and mobile business owners to find the right one to work with. To compile this list we researched the major players in the mobile advertising field, included companies that offer the wide range of ad formats and targeting options, as well as robust statistics and good technical support.
```List of mobile advertising networks,Categories,Ad Formats Models,Trading Models```
AdColony 
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Founded in 2011, AdColony was created by mobile developers, for mobile developers and has grown into one of the largest mobile advertising and monetization platforms in the world with a reach of more than 1.5 billion users globally. AdColony is known for its exclusive Instant-Play™ HD video, Aurora™ HD Interactive video, and playable technologies, its global performance advertising expertise, its programmatic marketplace, and its extensive ad SDK footprint in the top apps worldwide.
Mobile platforms: Android, IOS
Campaign types: CPM
Ad formats supported: Rich Media, Video
Targeting: Demographic
Key markets: US.
AdsCompass
Global Ad network for Publishers and Advertisers
AdsCompass - is a global ad network that offers mutually beneficial cooperation for webmasters, advertisers, media buyers and ad networks. Having our own Ad Exchange and Self-Serve Platform, we are able to provide all our partners multiple options to collaborate.
RevX
Made for Growth, Built for App Marketers
Made for growth, built for app marketers. At RevX, we help app businesses acquire and re-engage users via programmatic advertising to retain and accelerate revenue. We\'re all about taking your app business to the next growth level! We help you build sound mobile strategies, combining programmatic UA, app re-engagement, and performance branding to drive the results you need to scale your business: with real users, high retention, and incremental revenue.
AdAction
A full-service ad platform that connects mobile marketers to high-intent users worldwide.
AdAction is the leading full-service ad platform that delivers quality at volume with real-time, data-driven technology to optimize acquisition campaigns and drive maximum engagement.
Services: Mobile Ad Network, Mobile Ad Platform
Ad Format: Interstitial, Offerwall
Models: CPI, CPA, CPE, CPC
Trading Models: Managed Service.
RichAds
#1 Mobile Ad Network for Scaling Ad Campaigns
RichAds - #1 Mobile Ad Network Where Scale Meets Performance. Develop your advertising with the global self-serve performance ad platform. RichAds traffic quality is verified by Adscore which blocks any bot or other fraudulent traffic.
AdQuantum 
Revenue Acquisition for Mobile Apps
AdQuantum is an expert mobile marketing team of 30 media buyers and more than 300 designers with extensive experience acquiring premium quality traffic in a variety of fields (gaming, e-commerce, fitness-wellness, finance, travel, etc).
Mobupps
A One Stop Shop For All Your Mobile Marketing Needs
Mobupps is are a performance-oriented ad network, with over 10 years of experience in mobile user acquisition. The network leverages an access to private media from over 4,500 direct app publishers, as well as direct integration to all of the major global traffic sources.
Mobile platforms: Android, iOS,
Campaign types: CPC, CPI, CPM
Ad formats supported: App Icon, Audio, Banners, Content Lock, Coupons, Custom, In-App, Incentivized, Interstitial, Native, Notifications, Offer Wall, Pop up, PopUnder, Redirect, Rewarded Video, Rewards, Rich Media, Search, Social, Text, Video
Targeting: App, Carrier, Category, Country, Demographic, Device, Network, White & Black Lists
Key markets: Global.
Hitapps
Expert in digital advertising and app development since 2017.
Hitapps focuses on your success as a whole. Perhaps you can manage a small-scale campaign but, if you want to develop an impactful ads campaign, it’s better to let us take over.
Performance based marketing
RTB solution
Apps development and publishing.
SocialPeta
Ads Intelligence Tool For Marketing Strategy
SocialPeta Technology, the world’s leading advertisement creative spy and analysis platform, dedicated to offer top ads creative and marketing strategy for both advertisers and publishers. Serving as an Essential Ad and Marketing Intelligence Platform, SocialPeta focuses on:
Ad Intelligence, Marketing Intelligence, APP Intelligence
Ad Cost intelligence, Game Intelligence, Audience Intelligence.
myAppFree
High Quality Mobile Traffic & Exclusive Placements on SONY Xperia, Native SDK
myAppFree is a performance-based advertising platform, founded in 2015 in Italy by Massimo Caroli and Riccardo Fuzzi, that matches advertisers and publishers. One of the unique features it offers in terms of inventory for advertisers is an access to 40 million plus Sony Xperia smartphone users, as well as own App Discovery that features the best mobile apps for users to discover.
Mobile platforms: Android, iOS, Windows Phone
Campaign types: CPA, CPC, CPI
Ad formats supported: Banners, Interstitial, Native, Notifications
Targeting: Audience, Geo, Interests, OS, Platform
Key Markets: Asia, Europe, Latin America, USA.
Entravision
Entravision is the leading Performance One-Stop-Shop Digital Marketing Company
Entravision is the leading Performance One-Stop-Shop Digital Marketing Company. We set the beat of digital advertisement.
Get the scale and global footprint you are looking for. Our team is here to boost your campaigns and help you reach the consumers most likely to engage with your brand.
Key Features
Performance and strategy focus toward UA in mobile devices.
Mobile-first
Proprietary tech
API Integrations
Partnerships with industry key players
Renowned Growth Squad.
Adlane
Ad Network for Publishers and Website Owners.
Adlane is the ultimate way to monetize your traffic with all most popular formats. Key Features The project is designed specifically as an ultimate way to monetize your traffic using simple integration and popular ad formats: Browser Push notifications, In-page Push, Popunder, Display and Video by CPM / CPC models We invite everyone to adlane.
HUAWEI Ads
Mobile Marketing Platform tailored for HUAWEI devices.
[masterslider alias=\"ms-huawei-ads\"] Huawei has a rich history in the mobile and technology industry and is a leading provider of 5G infrastructure and smart phone devices and tablets. Huawei is committed to bringing digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected intelligent world.
InMobi 
Driving Real Connections
InMobi is the largest independent mobile ad network with global reach in markets including the UK, Europe, US, South Africa and India. InMobi offers advertisers to reach over 1,5 billion mobile users across more than 32,000 mobile properties to choose from. With InMobile mobile ad network, advertisers can launch brand engagement, user acquisition or remarking ad campaigns. Acquisition of a mobile rich media company Sprout allows InMobi to offer premium mobile ads as well as a huge volume of other inventory. Advertisers include leading brands such as Ford and Levis.
Mobile platforms: Android, iOS, Mobile Web
Campaign types: CPC, CPI, CPA, CPX, CPM
Ad formats supported: Banners, Native, Video, Interstitial, In-Game
Targeting: carrier, channel, country, device, operator, os, time
Key Markets: Europe, India, Japan, Kenya, South Africa, UK, United States
We’re a multi-format advertising network that operates in 240+ countries. Our aim is to provide both advertisers and publishers with Self-Serve Platform which is made for launching, managing, analyzing your campaigns, monetization process, and, more important, maximizing your revenue.
VEVE
CONNECTING BRANDS TO OEMs.
VEVE is a performance marketing platform from Affinity Global Inc. that offers unique advertising experiences across OEMs, browsers and telcos. With native, high-performing ad formats – Tiles , Notifications, Universal, unique media placements and customization opportunities, the platform is empowering brands to achieve their advertising KPIs such as sales, app downloads, website visits and user engagement. Additionally, it provides creative and operational support across different languages and locations including the US, UK, EU, IN, ID and CN. VEVE also has its proprietary reporting dashboard to access deep data insights to optimize conversions and user engagement. VEVE also unlocks newer monetization avenues for OEMs and browsers while enhancing users’ online journey.
Key Features
• Boost new user acquisition – Reach 500+ MN captive audience beyond search and social media network
• Achieve your advertising KPIs – All inventory bought is on performance KPIs such as CPI, CPA, CPC, CPV, etc.
• Highly engaging native ad experiences – Get high conversion rate with non-intrusive, user-friendly ad formats (Tiles, Notifications, Universal) and unique media placement
• 100% Brand safe environment – Custom reporting dashboards for complete transparency, real-time insights, and optimization opportunities
• End-to-end campaign management – Creative and operational support across different geographies (US, UK, EU, IN, ID, CN) and in multiple languages
App Samurai
Self-Service Mobile Advertising Tool for Startups
Mobile ad planning, execution and analysis are complicated for startups because they cannot reach all available app marketing tools. App Samurai makes it easy for them without requiring in-depth mobile advertising knowledge!
Thanks to App Samurai, you can easily create, manage, and measure acquisition campaigns, boost campaigns, and video campaigns to acquire qualified users.
ADxAD
pop, banners, native, member’s area traffic
ADxAD is CPM Ad network for advertiser looking for: High quality banner, pop, native, interstitial, member’s area traffic Adult, dating, betting, gambling, gaming vertical’s traffic Self-service and full-service platform CPM model WW volumes ( key geos: JP, VN, IN, TW, HK, SG, KR, PH, MY, TH, CN, US) Adjustable RON and Premium traffic streams oRTB endpoints and directlink support Payment methods: Wire (€, $), Paypal ($,€), Paxum ($,€), Capitalist ($,€).
Appodeal
Turn your Apps into Top-Earning Hits.
+250,000 developers, from indies to large enterprises, trust in Appodeal to manage their Ad Monetization. A light full-stack ad monetization solution that puts app publishers first – the way it should be.
By just integrating one simple SDK, you will gain access to +70 ad networks & demand sources, competing against each other in a real-time auction for every single ad impression.
Services: User Acquisition, Ad Monetization, Business Intelligence
Offices: San Francisco, US
Tagline: Turn your Apps into Top-Earning Hits.
SmartHub
Launch your own serviced, market-ready, efficient RTB marketplace in just 7 days.
SmartHub is a programmatic, white-label, RTB solution designed to facilitate ad tech market entry for companies that plan to set up their own branded marketplaces. For smaller enterprises, going in-house and building their own ad platforms can be increasingly challenging in terms of financial investment, human resources, tech capacities and time.
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