PapayaMobile makes its AppFlood cross-promotion network transparent to developers

Papaya Mobile said today it is making its AppFlood cross-promotion network see-through. The Beijing-based company provides a network that allows app makers to buy, sell, and exchange mobile app traffic. Now it will make that network transparent to developers so that they can maximize the money they make from it.

AppFlood will give developers transparency, accountability, and control, according to PapayaMobile chief executive Si Shen.

“AppFlood’s new features raise the bar for visibility, openness and accountability in the mobile app cross-promotion space,” said Si Shen, CEO of PapayaMobile, the company behind AppFlood. “Transparency has become a vital competitive advantage in mobile advertising, but so far, traditional mobile ad networks can’t deliver the visibility developers really want. AppFlood now has the openness developers need to deliver app marketing campaigns that are targeted, flexible and effective.”

New features such as the Open Direct Deal Network, Multi-Dimension Analytics, and Ad Network Mediation. These are the kinds of services that middlemen such as Papaya Mobile offer to Android and iOS developers who need to get lots of people to use their apps. In a free-to-play business, developers need many more users to make a lot of money. But it’s hard to get those users because it’s easy for an app to get lost on the app stores. Developers have turned to ad networks and cross-promotion to get their apps discovered. Many developers have begun using networks such as Chartboost’s to do direct exchanges of users, so a user of one app will see a promotion for an app built by another developer.

The problem with many of the middlemen, according to Papaya, is that they obscure what is happening. It becomes difficult for developers to understand whether their promotional spending is really producing large numbers of qualified users. So Papaya is making its network as transparent as it can. It offers in-depth insight, app marketing campaign management, and other tools to deliver good results.

AppFlood is neutral in that it doesn’t take revenue from either direct deals between its developers or network-bought traffic. The Open Direct Deal Network will combine the transparency of one-to-one direct deals between developers and publishers with the range and reach of a mobile ad network. Developers buy, sell or exchange traffic like they would with a normal ad network, and they will see the performance of every other app on the network. Developers can then identify which apps are the best potential partners for publishing and cross-promotion campaigns.

With Multi-Dimension Analytics, Papaya says users can identify opportunities to boost ad revenue and return-on-investment from an app via data mining. Developers will be able to use the analytics to test the performance of different ad networks. With Ad Network Mediation, developers can connect directly and compare app performance with various partner networks including Appia, Cyberagent, Unicume, Clickky, Altrooz, and Motive Interactive. The developers use a single software development kit and one dashboard. AppFlood makes it easy to optimize traffic and turn off weak advertising.

“By adding these new features, AppFlood is putting our money where our mouth is,” continued Shen. “We believe the visibility and insight now provided by AppFlood puts us well ahead of the competition, and finally gives developers the level of transparency and control they need to make the most of their app marketing investment.”

Papaya Mobile launched AppFlood a year ago, and it has 5,000 Android and iOS developers.

Whether Papaya’s network turns out to be truly transparent depends on the beholder. Other rivals will likely say that they can provide transparency as well, but there is no question that transparency has become a rallying cry for developers.