VentureBeat’s mobile ad index: Facebook appears, iAd drops out

VentureBeat announced its Mobile Advertising Index today, a listing of the top 10 companies helping marketers trying to reach mobile users.

The Mobile Advertising Index is based on research that includes several hundred survey responses from real users of mobile advertising products. The Index was announced first this morning at our MobileBeat 2013 conference.

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Now available: VentureBeat’s final report on the top 10 mobile ad networks is now available. More info here, and sign up to buy it here.

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VentureBeat kicked off the initiative four weeks ago, upon realizing that brands and marketers were confused by the significant number of mobile advertising networks and platforms. With all of the action going in mobile, we hoped to sort through the noise created by the 50-plus competitors in the industry.

Last month, we published our initial draft “top 10,” which we designed to provoke debate. At the outset, we’ve said this is a qualitative effort. It is not perfect, nor scientific, but we think it’s valuable nonetheless because, well, there’s nothing better out there. We based that initial draft on input from industry experts. However, today we’re publishing the results of our deeper investigation, including the data we collected from the several hundred people who responded to our user survey.

Here are the companies that make up the Index:

• AdColony
• Burstly
• Chartboost
• Facebook
• Flurry
• Google AdMob
• HasOffers
• InMobi
• Millennial Media
• MoPub

Notably, the Index today adds three new products to our initial list: AdColony, Burstly, and Facebook. These three received a tremendous response from their user bases, and much of the feedback was positive. On the other hand, the Index drops three other companies: Apple, Euclid, and Amobee. These three received almost no feedback from their user bases. We were surprised by the lack of enthusiasm for Apple. We expected a company with Apple’s clout would have inspired more excitement by now with its iAd product. So far, its efforts have been lackluster. It’s not just regular users who aren’t responding. Even experts we polled suggested Apple has along way to go: “What are they doing?” was the question we heard from more than one expert.

While iAd has underwhelmed, we were positively surprised by the action we’re seeing on the Facebook platform, which we reported about here.

We’ll be talking in more depth about the future of mobile advertising tomorrow, during the second day of MobileBeat.

VentureBeat’s Mobile Advertising Index report is the first of its kind in the technology sector, analyzing real user experience with products to help other developers, brands, and marketers make what we hope are more informed buying decisions.

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In our survey, we asked real users to provide us with information on the products they use, down to a very detailed level. VentureBeat received input on nearly 50 different products around the world.

VentureBeat plans to continue to take reader feedback on any and all products and to provide revised results in a timely basis to its readership. We’ll also be working on trending some of the key data to determine how developers are using these technologies over time.