In-app advertising: does it really help developers?

An article by Nokia Devs    8 Comments

All About Symbian recently published an interesting insight into in-app advertising, pointing out how some deficiencies currently limit its effectiveness for both users and developers. The article by Steve Litchfield specifically analyzes the ads and SDK provided by inneractive and highlightes various problems with them, including poor aesthetics and user experience.

The article led to an active discussion, with developers pointing out other aspects, as Rafi Ton talking about his own experience with the inneractive SDK:

I used their Symbian, Qt and WRT sdks with my apps and found the SDK to be very efficient.

and Andy Nugent expressing a doubt:

Mobile apps being funded by advertising other mobile apps doesn’t seem to be a very sustainable business model to me.

Yesterday an interview with Hillel Fuld, from inneractive, clarifies some points about the previous article, and tries to shed some light on the topic. Here is a short excerpt from his answers:

Symbian actually features a higher CTR than most platforms, closer to the 3%. We believe there are several reasons for the high engagement of Symbian users over other platforms.

First, the users are not “ad-blind”, like most iPhone and Android users are already. Keep in mind that Nokia’s perspective was always ‘think local’ and Ovi benefits from traffic from 200+ countries. Serving local ads to these markets usually ends up with higher response rates.

As from my point of view, Symbian (and more generally all Nokia platforms) seems to be at a very early stage when talking about advertising, and this is highly due to the big transition that Nokia is doing towards Qt as its mainstream technology, with still few available SDKs (as Smaato‘s one) and a lot of custom solutions implemented by developers.

I’d like to know your opinions about this: are you using ads in your apps? Do you have any suggestions for possible improvements of current advertising platforms?