NativeX launches new ad tech so developers can make more money off their games

Mobile ad platform maker NativeX is announcing a new product today that will help game developers incorporate better ads in their mobile games.

The Minnesota-based company has creative a new software development kit (SDK) that enables rich media native ads within games. Essentially, it’s turning the ad into a part of the gameplay, like an ad to purchase virtual currency when you reach a point in where you have to purchase something in order to make progress.

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The new ad tech provides a framework to institutionalize and scale up native ad format innovation. It gives game developers a lot of choices for interactive ads within a single SDK. In the past, developers had to use a bunch of different SDKs to experiment with types of ads. The new SDK offers multiple types of ads as well as server-side ad format creation in the HTML5 web format. Publishers can customize their ads more easily and tailor them so they work better.

The SDK uses machine learning and big data science techniques to optimize ads based on contextual and behavioral data. It shows the right ad to the right person.

“We know integrating ads into the user experience is more effective for the advertiser, more lucrative for the publisher, and more acceptable to the user,” said Andy Johnson, the CEO of NativeX. “The biggest challenge now is how to scale our platform, and our new SDK is our first step toward delivering a truly scalable native ad solution to the market.”

NativeX’s Michal Pilawski, the vice president of mobile product management, and NativeX adviser Trip Hawkins, the founder of Electronic Arts, will participate on a panel at GamesBeat 2013 conference. Entitled “Creating mobile ad experiences that don’t suck,” the session focuses on how developers can move beyond terrible mobile ads and reach the 95 percent of players who never purchase anything in a free-to-play game.

Early ads have failed to capture the attention of users, but early data on native ads, or those built into gameplay, consistently outperform other kinds of traditional ads in mobile games.

The new tech will address the problem of “SDK bloat,” or the need to incorporate a bunch of SDKs into a game in order to experiment with different ads.

“NativeX’s latest SDK allowed us to quickly optimize our creative on the fly without a painful SDK update and as a result we saw eCPMs increase by 110 percent.” said Johan Höglund, the CEO of Raketspel.

“NativeX is playing the role of a data science-based match maker between the advertiser and consumer, ensuring the consumer sees the right ad at the right time,” said James Shanahan, vice president of data science and chief data scientist at NativeX. “Native ads become part of the user experience of the game, and therefore it is more important than ever that ads are relevant. You need the right blend of art and science.”

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NativeX was founded as W3i in 2000 by three brothers, Rob, Ryan, and Aaron Weber. It has been profitable for years and has driven more than 1 billion app downloads to date. The company changed its name to NativeX last year.