With the number of ad networks and even ad formats growing constantly, it’s no simple matter for publishers to maximize their monetization potential. Appodeal Founder & CEO Pavel Golubev decided to build an automated monetization solution to help even the playing field. “The whole market is built in favor of advertisers, and middlemen cut too much – ad networks have huge margin rates. We wanted to bring the justice back to publishers,” Pavel said. For more on the technology behind Appodeal and details on some of the strategies it implements, see Pavel’s Casual Connect Europe lecture video below.
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When Pavel Golubev and the team at Alfa Productions launched Appodeal in September 2014, it was originally only meant as a tool for their own products. The goal was “a zero-effort, completely automated in-house monetization solution,” Pavel says.
At that point, Alfa Productions had published thousands of apps on Google Play and iOS, and they had experimented with every ad network, mediator and monetization platform they could. Appodeal was built up around that expertise and designed to automate the publisher’s strategy. Alfa applied the Appodeal technology to a set of experiments on the company’s inventory, and it didn’t take long to notice the impact.
“I was shocked and amazed when we noticed about a 270% growth in Alfa’s earnings,” Pavel says. “And I must say, by that moment, Alfa’s monetization setup was sophisticated enough, even without Appodeal.”
A month later, Pavel decided to create a new company to offer the new monetization technology to other publishers and app developers. The public version of Appodeal launched in January 2015.
As CEO of Appodeal, Pavel says the company’s goal is to help publishers generate more revenue with less effort and help prevent them from being taken advantage of by large advertisers.
“I love that by creating Appodeal, I help publishers increase revenue effortlessly,” Pavel says. “I also enjoy to watch Appodeal grow day by day. I am blessed to have an amazing team of strong leaders and wonderful engineers that are passionate about what we do.”
Currently, Appodeal is working with native ads in a programmatic way. Appodeal is pioneer in doing just that. They offer to their users segmentation tools on the user’s dashboards in order to take less risk and increase profits for the users by providing deep knowledge of the audience.
Setting Out
Before Alfa and Appodeal, Pavel had been in the games industry for several years, starting out “a long time ago, when Perl was still popular,” the dev and entrepreneur says.
The first project Pavel worked on was as one of the first staff members on the browser-based game Carnage, and the game-dev atmosphere was enjoyable.
“We didn’t wear corporate ties, everyone was friendly, there was momentum, bonuses, players who constantly argued with all of the innovations of the ‘administration.’ There was complete freedom for creativity,” Pavel says.
Eventually, Pavel grew tired of Moscow and decided to go on vacation in Thailand. The vacation turned into several years of traveling.
“I liked traveling and having fun, I didn’t want to think too much about work,” Pavel relates. “Perhaps this was the reason why I quickly ran out of money, got into debt, and in the end, I had to return to Moscow and go back to work.”
While back in Moscow, the developer found out about an interesting Silicon Valley startup, sent in a resume, and in a couple of days was helping develop the backend of Ruby on Rails.
New Areas to Explore
After a couple of months of working, Pavel’s financial pressures were resolved and they decided to travel to the US, “just for fun, to see Las Vegas, New York, see the Grand Canyon.” The trip didn’t seem so significant until Pavel’s return to the office.
“I did not even have enough time to get used to the new time zone when the company where I worked suddenly needed to send a couple of workers to San Francisco,” Pavel says. “Ironically, I was one of two people who had a valid visa to the US.”
The project in San Francisco was building a social network for mobile phones, simultaneously developing a couple of iPhone games to provide funding. After a while, the companies’ founders decided to shut everything down for personal reasons, but Pavel had already seen the potential of the new mobile market.
“I kept reminding myself of the enormous success of Carnage, and I suggested to my friend that we begin making games,” Pavel says. “With a lot of grief we found the money, used it to create our first game, released it and . . . boom, in a week we earned $18,000. Before that moment, I had never seen so much money in my account at once. On that day I understood that I wanted to be involved in this business sphere.”
Trends
After years in the industry and some very successful startups, Pavel has some predictions on where the market and technology will go next. Programmatic ad inventories will become more and more available, ranging from TV, VR, billboards and watches,to cars, taxis, menus at restaurants and more.
In mobile, small horizontal banners will continue to account for a sizable chunk of advertising due to the extreme popularity of social apps, but the overall share of banners will continue to drop.
Mobile will continue to catch up to the more-established desktop real-time bidding exchanges currently dominant in the market, eventually resulting in the “abundant flow of brands from desktop to mobile.”
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