Racing games outrun casual in Android mobile ad revenue in Q1

Racing games generated 2.5 times more revenue than casual titles in mobile ad revenue on Android in the first quarter.

That’s one of the findings of the first quarterly data report on global mobile advertising from AppFlood, a real-time bidding ad network in China operated by PapayaMobile. The findings also show that a lot of ad spending happens in the Western markets of Europe and the United States, much of the traffic growth is happening in Eastern markets in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Oceania.

About 56 percent of the traffic occurs in the Eastern markets, but only 33 percent of the mobile ad spend happens in the East. About 47 percent of the ad spend happens in the Western markets, which account for just 22 percent of the traffic. (Latin America accounts for 13 percent of traffic and Eastern Europe is 9 percent).

“Our data shows that amid mobile ad spend growing 62 percent quarter-over-quarter, the attention that’s long been on western advertisers is shifting to Chinese advertisers with massive ad budgets,” said Si Shen, co-founder and CEO of Papaya Mobile. “These Chinese advertisers are globally distributing mobile ad spend evenly across regions, which is changing the paradigm by fueling the rapid growth of the Eastern app economy.”

VentureBeat recently published the Mobile Games Monetization report.

The report found that mobile ad traffic grew 45 percent from the third quarter of 2013 to the first quarter of 2014. North America accounts for 23 percent of mobile app installations. Asia accounts for 21 percent of installations, Western Europe accounts for 20 percent, the Middle East accounts for 12 percent, Eastern Europe is 10 percent, Latin America is 10 percent, Africa is 3 percent and Oceania is 1 percent.

Global mobile ad spending grew 62 percent from the third quarter of 2013 to the first quarter of 2014. Beijing-based PapayaMobile said that Chinese advertisers are creating global campaigns that run across all regions, including Asia and the Middle East, which account for 53 percent of their mobile ad budget. Mobile ad spend on the Middle East has grown 62.4 percent since the third quarter of 2013. Cost-per-install peaked in the fourth quarter at 51 cents per install and leveled off to 30 cents per install in the first quarter.

More than 400 million unique phones have displayed app promotions from the AppFlood network, and the network serves more than 145 million monthly active users and 10,000 developers.

PapayaMobile said that its AppFlood business has grown revenues 384 percent from September 2013 to February 2014.

“With mobile advertising on the rise and desktop on the decline, we believe these numbers point to more brands, developers and advertisers seeing the indisputably high return on investment from advertising on mobile,” Shen said. “While traffic grows at a slower pace and demand grows from advertisers, developers and brands for mobile traffic, advertisers as a result are willing to pay more and allocate more budget toward buying mobile ad traffic.”

She added that real-time bidding networks help with scaling the buying and selling of more traffic in a shorter amount of time as this demand grows.

“We might even be beginning to see the beginnings of mobile ad spend catching up to time spent, to which Mary Meeker warned in her 2013 Internet Trend report,” Shen said.

Above: Top Android game categories in Q1 2014

Image Credit: AppFlood