App.io Ads – Your game becomes the mobile ad, with try-before-install

by davidbarker • 12 years ago

69 29 12 years ago

SavvyGuard• 12 years ago

I work in an ad tech company on the mobile product, and all of my coworkers are amazed by this. Congrats on actually innovating the mobile advertising space instead of another native ad/geolocation startup.

callmeed• 12 years ago

Hey, could I email you some questions? I have an idea in the mobile ad space and I'm not sure where to start. thx.

daveytea7• 12 years ago

Thanks! We've worked hard on this so it's great to hear other ad players like what we're doing. Maybe there's a way we can work together.

Feel free to reach out to me (david@app.io) if you want to chat :)

supercoder• 12 years ago

Certainly seems cool and I admire the way these guys have been pushing their company from when it was appfolio.

But a couple things worry me about these ads.

- If the user isn't in a mindset to look at another app, then could it be a bigger barrier to have something 'interactive' if they need to spend time waiting for menus , loading etc. At least a standard popup can show a screenshot and get straight to the point.

- Not being able to control the experience. If all networks were equal would be great, but how many users might come away thinking your app is slow , unresponsive etc because it can't stream the app in time ?

Seems like it could be great for expensive pay to install apps, but if the app is free anyway maybe it's just better to put the effort into getting them to download that, rather than play the ad.

emdowling2• 12 years ago

Thanks so much for your thoughts. Co-founder here.

- We give the user the opportunity to download the app at any time. It isn't in the video, but along the bottom, a download button is available at all times so the user can get to the App Store as quickly as possible. On loading: We actively encourage all apps using the platform to bypass menus and get straight to the content. That converts much better.

- We do a few things to ensure every user has a great experience and apps are not presented in a negative light. As quickly as we can (generally 200ms), we run a speed test to ensure latency and bandwidth are sufficient for a good experience. We also allow advertisers to specify a fallback video or static image, so if we can't deliver a great interactive experience, we are able to offer an ad which is at least as good as the existing types.

I'll also mention that the video on the homepage is actually a live filmed demo of a trial campaign.

coldcode• 12 years ago

This is pretty freaking amazing. I wonder how they intend to monetize sufficiently to support enough servers if this became popular. I think they need a little more information up front on the landing page, it took some digging to understand that this is essentially running a simulator build on their server and porting the bits to the browser and interactions back to the their servers and the app.

Apple should buy these folks pronto.

daveytea7• 12 years ago

Our economics work out pretty well ;)

Good point on having more info. What we've found is that developers will want to get into the nitty gritty details, whereas ads people will want easy to digest info about how it will benefit them.

If you're keen to find out more, we have some pretty good documentation: http://docs.app.io/

djt• 12 years ago

Nice one DT!

delackner• 12 years ago

Sorry, I'm a developer and tapped that API link and the first docs page said not one word that stood out about the main questions I wanted answered: what exactly are you doing and what is the latency.

jmduke• 12 years ago

Wow. This seems like an incredible iteration on mobile ad tech. How responsive (as in from a UX standpoint) are the trials?

daveytea7• 12 years ago

Super responsive. :)

It's a streaming tech, but we can target on the ad network level (wifi/4g/3g/etc). We only run ads on devices where we know they'll have a great user experience, since we hate crappy ads as well!

onmydesk2• 12 years ago

Relies on the app running in a browser? what about native apps?

emdowling2• 12 years ago

Might be a miscommunication on our site! We run native iOS apps in the simulator environment - if you have a simulator build of your native app, we can use it as an ad.

Our previous/existing product enables apps to run inside any browser, and we have a lot of people using this platform for QA, customer support, etc.

onmydesk2• 12 years ago

My bad, skimmed it a lot. Thats interesting, why am I making android versions?

MaxGabriel2• 12 years ago

This is really cool. Do you guys support apps that use multitouch?

daveytea7• 12 years ago

Not quite yet, but it's in the roadmap!

MaxGabriel2• 12 years ago

You advertised a 3x conversion rate, so I presume you guys are live in the wild—are there any publishers where I can see these ads in action?

daveytea7• 12 years ago

Correct! We'll be releasing data in the coming weeks so stay tuned!

Rodeoclash• 12 years ago

Congratulations guys, good to see it out there, and I'm glad to see you're better at building a business then Chris is at Foosball ;)

chrisnolet3• 12 years ago

Naww, thanks. I'll take that as a compliment? ;)

khangtoh• 12 years ago

Just a quick question about the tech.

Apps are ran in a simulator, and screen caps is being streamed real-time to the client, then drawn on the canvas. Is that correct?

chrisnolet3• 12 years ago

Hi Khangtoh,

That's essentially correct. We do a bit of magic to stream the smallest amount of image data possible (sending mostly-transparent frames if pixel data hasn't changed, etc.). Put simply though: yes, you can think of it as a simulator being streamed to an HTML canvas. But it's taken a long while to get right!

bananaoomarang• 12 years ago

hey, this is actually a good idea. this actually seems like a genuinely good idea! Congrats :P

munimkazia• 12 years ago

That is really cool. Something this cool rarely comes in a field like advertising. I only wish I was a game developer to try this!

superasn• 12 years ago

Do you have any plans to proxy the sound as well? (because i couldn't hear anything on the Klingelring demo)

daveytea7• 12 years ago

We don't have plans immediately.

philo23• 12 years ago

I'm curious how you get around normally being able to only run one instance of the iOS simulator at a time? Having a load of OS X machines for each individual stream or even virtualised hosts cannot be the case surely?

Either way it's done, it's a very impressive way to show off your apps and works suprisingly well.

daveytea7• 12 years ago

Well, that's where some of our magic comes in :) I'll see if one of our techies can shed some more light on it for you.

App.io Ads – Your game becomes the mobile ad, with try-before-install

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