The company hopes Marketplace will stand out because it is offering app publishers and developers a way to sell their ad inventory while also giving them accurate data about their audience. Flurry’s audience data is the big draw: the company said it has access to information about 300,000 apps used on over 1 billion devices. Flurry claims to have access to the user habits of 90 percent of all active smartphones and tablets in the world.

The idea is that if publishers understand more about who is using their apps — like parents or college students, for example — and why, they can make better decisions about where to place their ads in real time.

There are other real-time exchanges for mobile app publishers — like MoPub and Nexage, for example – but those still need outside user data to know how to target your ads.

Marketplace is the latest in Flurry’s effort to expand its capabilities to be a one-stop shop for serving app developers and publishers. Late last year it raised a $25 million dollar funding round, and already this year it launched one new product, a free crash reporting tool for app makers.

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A new study by Forrester Research claims that so-called “programmatic” buying or “real time bidding” will account for nearly 25 percent of online video ad purchases by next year. This mirrors what is going on in the world of display advertising where more big advertisers are using ad tech tools to serve ads to diverse audiences in real time.

The report, which was commissioned by SpotXchange (an online video exchange that has skin in the ad game), also says that premium publishers have been slower to adopt programmatic bidding, in part because they fear it will undercut the value of their inventory. The report predicts, however, that many of these hold-out publishers will change their position as brands get accustomed to programmatic buying and begin to demand it.

The impact of programmatic on video ad prices is debatable. People in the ad tech industry point out that automated ad buying is simply a tool — not a reflection of ad quality. By this reasoning, publishers can hold their pricing line if they wish while also ensuring that their space is available in real time when there is a surge in demand. Conversely, as the report points out, publishers remain wary that brands will use the tools (as they did for display advertising) to drive down prices.

Overall, the future of video prices in the short term may be determined less by ad tech tools than by more basic principles of supply and demand. On this front, the good news for publishers can be seen in this chart which shows online ad spending rising quickly:

Another recent report is even more optimistic — pegging the 2013 number at $4.1 billion.

The bad news, though, is that the word is out about video’s promise and more and more people are showing up to grab a slice of the pie. Ad industry sources told the Wall Street Journal last month that there is ”not enough to feed everybody.” The Journal reported that, despite brands beginning to reallocate their TV budgets, prices are already under pressure; $15 to $20 per thousand views (CPM’s) last year versus a CPM of $17 to $25 in 2011.

The Forrester report also predicts that video ad inventory will be become increasingly divided between private and public exchanges.

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On Thursday, the demand-side platform (DSP) announced that it has raised $7.4 million in Series B funding in a round led by Spark Capital and Foundry Group and including its earlier investors. The new round brings its total amount raised to more than $12.4 million.

As one of the companies that provides retargeting tools to help advertisers reach Facebook users through the social network’s Facebook Exchange (FBX), CEO and co-founder Zach Coelius said Triggit has received plenty of new business from around the country and around the world.

“Our core reason for existence is to help advertisers leverage customer relationships and help them communicate across different sources of content in really relevant ways,” said Coelius. “Facebook and what they’re doing is perfect for what we do. … This is just the beginning.”

Through the Facebook Exchange, advertisers can target ads to users based on their general web browsing history. In addition to Triggit, the Facebook Exchange partners include Appnexus, Adroll, DataXu and Criteo. But Coelius said Triggit was one of the few early DSP partners able to serve international advertisers interested in marketing through FBX. About 90 percent of the company’s growth has come from new business, he added, and about half of that has been international.

To continue to meet that demand, Coelius said, the company plans to focus on international expansion, with hires in Asia, Europe and South America in the first quarter of next year or even sooner.

He also said that the company is nearing profitability and could reach it in the next month if they held back on hiring, but he emphasized that the current focus for the company is growth not profitability.

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In its first forecast on the fast-growing method of buying and selling display advertising, eMarketer said real-time bidding (RTB) will account for 13 percent of all U.S. display ad spending this year, which is more than triple its share in 2010.

While the overall U.S. display ad market is expected to grow 21.5 percent to $14.98 billion this year, eMarketer estimates that RTB spending will grow 98 percent to reach $1.9 billion in 2012. By 2015, the firm projects that spending on RTB could climb to $5.8 billion.

Several factors — including an influx of video and mobile inventory, an expected increase in the availability of premium ad inventory and overall demand for more transparency — are projected to fuel that growth, eMarketer said. But the firm said Facebook’s ad exchange, FBX, which it launched in September, is expected to play a key role in the rise of RTB.

Through the platform, advertisers can target ads to Facebook users based on their general web browsing history. In a recent conversation with Adweek, Rob Norman, chief digital officer at GroupM, said he believed that FBX had already “quadrupled” the market for advertisers interested in buying through real-time bidding.

Clark Fredricksen, eMarketer’s vice president of communications, said it’s unclear exactly how much Facebook’s ad exchange will drive future RTB growth. But he said that if just 10 percent of Facebook’s projected $5.5 million in ad revenue in 2013 were to go through the exchange, it would increase real-time bidding’s share of ad spending by 1.5 percent.

“Even the slightest investment in FBX from advertisers could significantly effect the growth of RTB overall,” he said.  “The growth of Facebook’s ad exchange will be highly influential.”

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In a blog post today, the social network is set to announce that its new exchange – which allows advertisers to target ads to Facebook users based on their general web browsing history – is opening out of a beta test period involving more than a dozen demand-side platforms (DSPs) and a limited number of brand advertisers.

Through the new exchange, Facebook and its partners use cookies to track user web browsing behavior and then serve up related ads on Facebook. For example, if you go to a travel site to search for a flight but then don’t complete the booking, the Facebook Exchange makes it possible for the travel site to bid in real-time for the opportunity to show you a relevant ad when you return to Facebook.

Partners report increased ROI for Facebook Exchange advertisers

Zach Coelius, CEO and co-founder of Triggit, one of the partners, said that although Facebook has come under recent scrutiny as an effective ad platform, from his observation, Facebook’s ads are well-placed and attract a strong level of engagement from users.

“Facebook as a platform has gotten a bum rap,” said. “But we’ve never seen anything as good as this.”

In the three-month test period, Triggit found that ads served through the Facebook Exchange generated an average of four times the return on ad spending compared to traditional display retargeting and resulted in a click-through conversion rate that was 2.2 times higher. The cost per click-through order for Facebook Exchange ads was also 6.5 times lower, the company said.

While ads served through traditional RTB display are typically just seen by consumers when they return from work, during their leisure hours, Triggit found that Facebook Exchange ads are more consistently seen throughout the day. Their data also show that conversions on the Facebook exchange are twice as likely to happen in the first two days than they are on traditional display.

While the volume of ads served at the beginning was small, Coelius said, Facebook rolled out a full-scale RTB (real-time bidding) exchange faster than anyone else Triggit has worked with.

Other partners also report strong results. New York-based AppNexus said advertisers who worked with its client Accordant Media, a digital media buying and optimization firm, were able to increase their reach through the Facebook Exchange while reducing their cost per action by as much as 25 percent. Advertisers with business marketing firm Bizo were able to increase audience reach by 30 percent while maintaining impression and conversion rates, AppNexus said.

Still early days

Retargeting platform AdRoll said that, on average, Facebook Exchange advertisers saw an average Return on Investment of 16X, which is on par with standard display advertising channels.

Adam Berke, AdRoll’s president, said that while his clients had positive experiences with the new exchange it’s still too early to make conclusive generalizations given how different Facebook’s inventory is and how differently advertisers bid on its platform.

“It’s so early in the roll-out of the exchange,” he said.  “Anyone who feels like they have a fully-baked Facebook Exchange product and knows exactly how it performs is probably coming to conclusions a little too soon.”

For Facebook, which has seen its stock price lose nearly half its value since going public in May (the stock got a bump this week after CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s first public interview), the new exchange could be a critical way for the company to show its value as an ad platform and earn revenue.

Last month, amid reports of underperformance through the first half of 2012 and questions about the effectiveness of some of its ad products, eMarketer, cut its 2012 revenue projections for Facebook from $5 billion to just over $4 billion.

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Madvertise’s RTB feature comes as part of its new madPlus platform, revealed on Monday. The platform also comes with a campaign-planning tool called madPlus Trading and is, according to Madvertise global partnerships chief Vincent Pelillo, fully compliant with the OpenRTB 2.0 technical standard.

All of which is quite similar to what Smaato, a U.S. competitor that also has a European office in Germany, announced just last month. So what’s the difference here?

As previously, Madvertise is heavily touting its core targeting tech. While Apple scratches its head trying to figure out a successor to the unique device identifier (UDID) technology that recently hit headlines again thanks to the mysterious actions of hackers at Anonymous, tracking user behaviour has become a complicated business.

And Madvertise reckons its secret-sauce algorithms, which correlate dozens of data types from rough location to browser and app choice, give the company a fighting chance in targeting specific demographics.

As Pelillo put it:

“We have the ability to do some interesting things due to our experience as a network. We get to start with all the data, experience, and traffic that comes from our network business, and the partners we integrate can immediately benefit from that. Since we are integrating the supply, the demand, and the exchange, we offer a turn-key solution for anyone interested in doing business with us. As a result improved targeting and machine learning techniques can result in higher eCPMs for publishers and better campaign targeting/delivery for advertisers and agencies.”

The company already seems to be making impressive headway. When we last caught up with Madvertise in May, the company was touting two billion monthly impressions – and that was taking into account the impressions it was buying in through its purchase of Turkish rival Mobilike.

Now it says it’s scoring six billion monthly impressions. That’s 200 percent growth in five months.

According to Pelillo, the sudden growth spurt is down to a few factors: footprint growth in Spain, Italy, the UK and Germany; the aftermath of the Mobilike acquisition; and a huge amount of supply-side partnership-inking over the last four months, in anticipation of the madPlus RTB launch we see today.

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Through the service, advertisers will be able to target ads to Facebook users based on their browsing history, Facebook spokeswoman Annie Ta told Bloomberg. The ads will be served through third-party demand-side platforms (DSP) including AppNexus, DataXu, MediaMath, AdRoll and Turn, and will be priced based on the cost per thousand views. According to Bloomberg, the new service is also designed to let advertisers deliver more time-sensitive messages.

“By bidding on a specific impression rather than a larger group, advertisers are able to show people more relevant ads while
also running more efficient and effective campaigns,” the company said in a statement. As an example, Facebook said the exchange would enable a travel site to show an ad to Facebook user who searched for a flight but did not complete the booking.

For Facebook, the new exchange means more revenue potential from advertisers looking for more ways to reach users they’ve tracked elsewhere on the Web. It could also bring the social network one step closer to creating the Web-wide ad network that many think is on the way. For consumers, Facebook says the exchange means more relevant advertising, but it might be a bit of an adjustment. Even though real-time bidding networks operate across the Web, including via Google, it’s the first time Facebook has introduced this kind of approach on its platform.

Since its public debut, Facebook’s stock has dropped about 28 percent. As it tries to prove its IPO-day valuation of $100 billion, it will inevitably be under pressure to show investors that it’s willing to open up more of its platform – and, eventually, its data – to advertisers. For now, however, it seems that Facebook is roping off its contextual data about users from advertisers buying audiences through the new exchange. According to AdExchanger, the exchange partners and advertising clients will only be able to use their in-house data or information supplied by data partners, not Facebook data regarding user “likes” and other activity. In addition to holding back user data from advertisers, the social network said, users will still have the same control over ads they see on Facebook as they do now.

According to estimates from research firm eMarketer, Facebook is on track to grow its ad revenues 60 percent this year to top $5 billion.

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Nexage launched three years ago and slowly built up its business before having a break-out year in 2011, when it started hitting a run rate of more than 10 billion ads served a month. It’s a nice milestone for a company that has been at the forefront of bringing real-time bidding to mobile advertising. And it shows how RTB auctions are becoming an important tool for advertisers looking to target consumers.

Ernie Cormier, Nexage’s CEO, said real-time bidding on mobile is different than online, where it’s used to unload a lot of impressions. Because mobile doesn’t support the kind of buy-side data produced through cookies, advertisers turn to publishers and exchanges to get information on users such as location, age and demographics. And with real-time auctions, advertisers can purchase the impressions they want, when they want them.

“We believe the future of exchanges is bigger in mobile than online because it’s not a place where impressions go to die,” Cormier said. “We believe RTB is critical to the growth of mobile and enables lot of things in mobile that couldn’t be possible otherwise.”

Nexage’s growth isn’t as gaudy as some other big mobile advertising names like Millennial Media, which serves up 40 billion ad impressions per month and recently filed to go public. But with its real-time bidding and mediation platform and its new private exchange, Nexage is providing valuable tools that show how the mobile advertising space is maturing and following the path of online. And now we’re starting to see advertisers increasingly look at mobile advertising as a way to reach consumers, who are rushing to mobile.

EMarketer last month upped its forecast for U.S. mobile ad spending this year to $2.6 billion from a previous estimate of $1.8 billion. It said that U.S. mobile ad spending hit $1.4 billion last year, ahead of a previous forecast of $1.2 billion. EMarketer now expects mobile ad spending to reach $10.8 billion by 2016.

That still trails online advertising, which is expected to bring in $39.5 billion this year in the U.S. But as we’re seeing, consumers are spending more and more time on mobile devices and brands are seeing big increases in engagement through smartphones and tablets. That’s going to prompt a big shift in marketing dollars as advertisers take advantage of mobile more and more.

“All of these patterns are pointing to a lot more mobile usage and engagement and interaction,” Cormier said. “You know that advertisers will follow the audience, it’s just a matter of working out the mechanics and getting players in the ecosystem with the tools they need.”

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Demand for location-based ads are also going up, jumping by 170 percent over the same period. More and more, advertisers are pursuing mobile ads that include location data because they can find users where they are, target specific areas and can drive consumers to take actions locally.

Some companies are seeing an even bigger pop from location-enabled ad impressions. Social gamification platform Beintoo said its partner apps like Fruit Ninja have seen an 11x premium in location-enabled impressions over ad impressions without location data, said Nexage. Beintoo has doubled the number of ads it has requested on the Nexage Revenue Platform over the last three months.

I talked with Nexage CEO Ernie Cormier and he said the rising value of location-based advertising is driven by growth in local deal providers, who want to push out very targeted coupons, as well as brand advertisers looking to hit specific regions or metro areas. And there are advertisers who want to confine their message to specific latitude and longitude locations or zip codes to hit only local consumers.

He said the big constraint is on the supply side, where mobile developers and publishers need to enable ad inventory that leverages location information. Some publishers just need to work through their customer privacy policies to reflect the fact that they will tap a user’s location for advertising. Other developers are constrained by platforms like iOS, which prohibits apps from leveraging a user’s location unless they are providing a service based on location. Nexage is working with developers and publishers to show them how they can get more value out of their inventory, especially ads that can include location data.

“Any kind of location data we can get — lat-long, zip code or region — we’re getting demand for it. All the inventory we can get, we’re selling,” Cormier said.

Nexage’s real-time bidding is well suited for advertisers looking to buy location-enabled impressions. Because it’s a real-time auction, they can choose when they want to target their ads, which go out immediately, and they can combine it with location to make them more effective. Increasingly, advertisers are getting savvy about using a combination of time and location to better target consumers and understand what they might be open to depending on where they are and the time of day.

Cormier said the demand for more location-based ad inventory is only going to go up in the coming years. And publishers are learning that the power of location-based ads is real and valuable to their bottom line.

“We don’t see any end in sight for demand. As people see the value especially for offer-based advertising and publishers manage their privacy issues, we think it will continue to grow. If publishers do the things we talk about today, it’s not really theory anymore. It’s fact; you will see an uplift in revenue,” Cormier said.

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