Fairlady Media

The Results Are In: Mobclix Came Out Ahead, BUT…

Posted on March 5, 2010 in Dev Articles

Back in December, I posted an article entitled “Mobclix vs. Admob: Who Will Win Our Business?”. During that time, we were participating in a Challenge in which Mobclix asked developers (who were already using Admob to advertise within their games) to re-route 50% of their advertisement traffic through Mobclix. If Mobclix did not yield higher returns than Admob during the challenge period, they would award $10,000 worth of free advertising to the developer. And now the results are officially in! Today, Mobclix posted the results of the Challenge on their website, and featured our game, Spazzle!, as one of the apps with great returns.

Here are some behind-the-scenes numbers for how the two advertising companies performed in Spazzle during the challenge period. One complicating factor was that users did not upgrade to the newest version of Spazzle! right away after Mobclix was integrated, so we were actually sending less than 50% of our traffic to Mobclix. So, to compare the two companies, we used “number-of-impressions-it-takes-to-earn-a-buck, or NITB”.

As you can see, with Admob we needed to display on average 325 ads to earn a dollar, whereas with Mobclix, we needed to display only 251 ads to earn a dollar. When we’re dealing with 40,000+ ad impressions per day, that does add up to significant differences in revenue.

I’m sure you’re wondering whether these results have extended beyond the Challenge period. And the answer is: not so much. Both companies performed very well for us in December in terms of  fill rates and revenue. Then, there was the expected dropoff after the holidays. Now both companies are recovering from the post-holiday slump and we’re able to compare numbers again. So, let’s take a look at the last two weeks in February, just for fun:

What?! As you can see, both companies are now about equal, with Admob just slightly ahead. Our conclusion? Until we see a clear leader over the long-term, we’re going to continue to diversify our advertisements by using both companies. Besides, we’ve found that a greater diversity of ads causes higher click-throughs. We do look forward to the next Challenge, though!

Tags: admob, App, App Store, challenge, develop, developer, Fairlady Media, free, game, games, iPhone, iPod, mobclix, numbers, Spazzle