Ad aggregator Smaato reveals countries' relative advertising value with its new Global Price Index
Given Finnish Smaato aggregates activity across 80 ad networks in over 230 countries, supporting over 55,000 app developers and managing over 190 billion impressions in Q4 2011 alone, it's ideally placed to pull back the curtain on relative pricing.
That's the background to its Global Price Index, which is designed to serve as a rate card for mobile advertising.
Smaato hopes the transparency it provides will help developers and advertisers better navigate the mobile advertising ecosystem and hence better plan and rollout their campaigns.
Push me, pull you
Of course, the two groups' demands are directly opposed
Advertisers want to target the most relevant customers, usually as cheaply as possible, while developers want to achieve the highest average revenue per user.
The Global Price Index uses the US to provide a baseline score of 100, with lower scoring countries such as Indonesia and Egypt representing value for advertisers.
Having a strong audience in higher scoring markets such as South Africa and Western Europe is prime for developers and publishers, however.
More detailed reports will be made available on a quarterly basis with the first being ready for download in early April 2012.
Booming times
As for Smaato itself, 2011 proved to be a banner year.
It added 44,000 developers and 28 new ad networks to its infrastructure, seeing its growth (we assume revenue, but that's not specified) up 200 percent.
And it opened new offices in Singapore, New York, London, Jakarta and Mumbai.
"Reaching record growth numbers in 2011, Smaato continues to push the mobile advertising envelope on performance and scale," said co-founder and CEO Ragnar Kruse.
"At Smaato, we are the one-stop shop for fast-growing publishers to optimise international advertising revenues.
"Our global reach, pioneering technology and local market expertise makes us an ideal partner to help app developers navigate through the complexity, paving the way for those looking to harness mobile advertising's true value."
Opening Windows
In addition to the new index, Smaato has added support for Windows Phone to its ad optimisation platform SOMA, as well as new real-time bidding capabilities.
The company claims mobile ads can now be purchased and served on-the-fly, offering an alternative of the traditional model of reserving prepaid slots.
The idea is to encourage more advertisers to the mobile medium, handing them more control and - if all goes to plan - allowing them to achieve a better return on investment and greater user engagement.
The new Windows Phone SDK which supports version 7.5 (also known as Mango) - is free to download from Smaato's website.