“Silent Giant” Millennial Media is Majority of Mobile Monetization Map
July 17, 2009
Filed Under: in AT&T, Analysis, BlackBerry, Featured Articles, Marketing 2.0, Mobile, Palm Pre, Social Media, Startups, iPhone
Author: Mark 'Rizzn' Hopkins
Welcome back.
Have you heard of Millennial Media? Chances are you haven’t. Tricia Duryee at Moconews described them as a ‘silent giant in the room’ when it comes to the mobile monetization sector.
According to information released earlier today in their ‘SMART’ report, Millennial Media is not just a giant, but the giant, completely overshadowing all the other players in the mobile app monetization world.
The world of mobile smartphone app monetization can be an imprecise world to navigate. John Furrier and I spent quite a bit of time earlier in the week on the phone with Chris Lum of Nielsen Mobile in an attempt to get some handle on how to better serve our audience in the new mobile section of the site.
“The sector is so new, the data we have on usage and monetization schemes isn’t as complete and full figured like the data we collect on web usage,” said Lum.
He said that most of the data they collect relies on surveys, and that the direct monetization stats, usage data, CPMs and engagement rates can be derived from those surveys, but that the app developers and ad networks sit on the real treasure trove of data.
So, What’s in the Treasure Chest, Cap’n?
The most incredible statistic released in the report was actually sourced from a previous Nielsen report, according to the fine print we read (and confirmed by Lum).
According to Nielsen’s mobile reach numbers, the mobile web extends to 59.8 million users, and Millennial’s network extends to 44.2 million sets of those eyeballs, by far making them the gorilla in the room.
This correlates with the data we obtained when we spoke about AdMob and AdWhirl last month:
AdMob is, as has been said several times, the ‘800 pound gorilla’ in the room, with a network reach around 6 billion monthly impressions, where AdMob is currently at only a billion or so. Furthermore, according to Nielsen’s stats, AdMob is a very distant fourth in audience reach, behind Millennial Media, Yahoo, and then Google.
What the SMART report also wants to make very clear is that Millennial Media is a very good network to put your ads on, going in great detail to explain their CPEU, or cost per engaged user.
For those unfamiliar with CPEU, don’t worry. I follow advertising trends and acronyms better than most (I gave a talk at Wordcamp Dallas this year that spent almost half it’s length explaining advertising acronyms), and it’s a new one to me.
It’s essentially a more precise way of explaining the engagement rate, and seems to be geared toward explaining the return on investment for advertisers on the network (as opposed to an eCPM stat, which would be geared towards explaining the ROI for a publisher).
I reached out to Millennial to get a more precise definition, since it isn’t a standard term in common vernacular yet. They explained it thusly: “CPEU shows what it costs to engage one user to do one thing by targeting method.”
Based on the data they provide, I’m intrigued as to what may have caused the drop in cost for the takeover method, as it’s by far and away the most effective means to encourage uses to interact with the ad, and certainly the one with the most drastic change.
Could it be simply the advent of the summer blockbuster season? It’s one possible explanation. Millennial maintains relationships with all of the major studios, and now is the time to try to get butts in seats for the most expensive films of the year – though that doesn’t explain why that particular category of ad performs better than all the others.
The other explanation that might shed some light on it is Millennial’s jump in iPhone app users. Millennial provides pretty complete data in terms of what types of handsets are being used by those who view ads on their network, and the iPhone category showed a jump of over 2% in numbers of ad impressions in June (although the iPhone only consists of 9% of all the ad impressions served for the whole network).
The full report can be found at Millennial Media’s site, and contains a great deal of information that can be useful for not just advertisers (though it’s certainly geared primarily for their advertisers) but app developers as well.
In general, Millennial strikes me as being a bit like VideoEgg is for the web platform. In my web applications, I tend to rely heavily on networks like VideoEgg because while they pay out only for engaged users on the developer side, the high concentration of mainstream entertainment ad campaigns appeals to all audiences, and it’s not uncommon to see eCPMs upward of $15, which outperforms almost all other forms of web monetization.
A good example of a company focused on delivering their solution and building market share and not worried about catching headlines.
Not being HQ'd in the bay area they definitely get overshadowed with the efforts of Google, Yahoo! and AdMob in the mobile ad space.
So much happening in the mobile space and its all really just tip of the iceberg. ~60 million users aint bad.., but by the end of next year with the handsets coming out and modern javascript enabled browsers on all of them we should see a nice uptick in not only usage by consumers but also reporting and engagement numbers.
"CPEU shows what it costs to engage one user to do one thing by targeting method.”
That sure is a fancy definition, but I have no clue what it means, and I have an above average grasp of English. Can you find out what it actually means? Because honestly, all it sounds like right now is something some pimply faced kid would throw at a befuddled VC to bilk him out of several million dollars.
When John and I were talking with Chris Lum yesterday on this, I was really surprised how nascent the mobile app and monetization world is. Given how established we have things in the web world, i'd've expected a lot of this to translate over to mobile web, but it's apparently not the case.
Everyone should remember it was only 2 short years ago that Apple was DEBATING about letting mobile apps be developed on the iphone by third parties. Its a brave new world.
CPEU - seems like an interesting term. I was talking with another startup that is in the mobile sector and there needs to be new terms on how users are engaged. In fact their term was CPE (cost per engagement).
I think these guys (MillenialMedia) are on the right track. It's a new world and as already stated above - the mobile market is only going to get bigger, not smaller!
It's curious why so many people are still saying AdMob is the big boy when other data so clearly shows that they aren't.
I couldn't agree with you more on the VideoEgg/Millenial Media comparison. While niche advertising is all well and good, it can be too limiting in its reach. If you can go with broader appeal advertisements (i.e. summer movies), then you're going to see a lot more engagement.
Hopefully people will begin realizing there are alternatives out there for ad serves.
Wow - how far we've come.
I can't *remember* a time when there wasn't a dominance of iPhone app stories on every blog I read.
I'm sure there's an app for that, though.
I agree, this is a great example of a company focused on the right things...what they, not just getting credit for it. While others scramble to get headlines they've been quietly surpassing the competition.
And thanks for explaining CPEU in a way I can actually understand!
Very enlightening information Mark.
I remember speaking with Stan Lee about four years ago as he was foretelling the future of mob-i-sodes. Before the advent of larger screens, I just couldn't see the medium being conducive for imaginative scale 'scenes.' Now of course, our platform is the hand - by sheer nature we're engaged, on the move and want our content in the context of our real-world.
For me, this is the perfect convergence of immediate message delivery and response measurement. I'm interested in reading the findings from Millennial Media as we race towards bringing more support for independent film and music.
Thanks for covering this so thoroughly.
Art, not so sure pimply little faced kids are getting much of any VC financing these days. Sure maybe VCs are being bilked out of millions by bad business plans but mobile advertising to me is taking the same shape that original banner ads took on web sites. First the impressions drove everthing - it was all about impressions. Then a lull period of confusion ... then just prior to the big downturn of 2001 hit it dawned on people that performance mattered and traffic meant nothing -quality traffic was rewarded but only if it performed -- hence the market drove to new metric CPC and CPA.
In mobile were seeing the same thing..massive uptake by users (traffic), more available inventory (apps, sites, ads,..etc) and a movement off of impressions to something "new" CPEU.
In plain English it might be described as an evolution in mobile advertising - a metric to describe real performance of how well ads work
This is a pretty incredible share of the market place for a company that most of us have never heard of before. How can a company so unknown to the masses be so huge? It boggles the mind, but this report is fascinating.
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