Mobile Display Advertising in 2017 … Is it DEAD or NOT?

Mobile advertising has been driving the affiliate marketing industry for a couple years now, many of STM members made millions from it … and many still do. But while we still see PPV/POPs running strong, mobile Display (banners) took a huge nosedive – at least when it comes to the standard affiliate offers like sweeps, antivirus, PIN submits … the easy to convert offers we all love.

The reasons for this were pretty hard to identify, it happened pretty suddenly and nobody really had a definitive answer I’m afraid. However, I dedicated quite some time to figure out what happened and I think I was able to identify the main problems … so let me present them to you.

FIRST OF ALL, NOT ALL MOBILE DISPLAY IS DEAD!

Adwords, Bing, Facebook … even Adult … mobile display still works the same way on all of them. There was no significant performance drop on any of them. So if you promote legit/compliant products, you can still use regular mobile banners on google for example and you can expect pretty much the same performance as a year ago.

Adult traffic, that is based mostly around banners, also didn’t see any special drop in performance. Certainly nothing that would indicate a format problem – there are ups and downs all the time of course, but the display format is still working well.

Facebook utilizes a number of display formats, it’s not exactly banners, I know … but if anything, they grew last year, instead of going down.

This all indicates one thing, there is no problem with the “mobile banner” format itself or mobile advertising in general … it’s somewhere else.

IT’S JUST THE MDSP’S THAT GOT SCREWED.

By talking to many affiliates and analyzing my own experience too, I came to the conclusion it was just the mDSPs that got affected – so networks like Avazu mDSP or Go2Mobi… Which indicates an isolated problem that only relates to the mDSP model.

Just to make sure everyone knows what I’m talking about, mDSP means : Mobile Demand Side Platform. DSPs provide access to large Ad Exchanges that do not normally work with small affiliates directly. So in order to buy traffic from a large AD exchange, you make a bid at a DSP and they will enter the auction for you. It’s a similar concept to stock exchanges for ex ...