This Mobile Advertising Network Wants To Get To The Number 1 Spot And Aims To Become A US$100 Million Company By 2015

We had a discussion with Mr Dippak Khurana, CEO and Co-Founder Vserv.mobi and he revealed some interesting facts about the Indian mobile ad network, how Vserv makes money and what new features did they introduce to the platform in 2013.

Most people know Vserv as a mobile advertising platform. Tell our readers something more about the company. Vserv.mobi is a global mobile advertising network for app developers, publishers, advertisers and telecom providers focused on emerging markets. Our business model enables content creators, mostly developers of mobile apps/games and mobile site publishers, to monetise their work. At the same time, advertisers can use these apps and games as an effective vehicle to reach their target customers. The company derives its core competitive advantage from our understanding of emerging markets and the unique challenges faced by the mobile ecosystem in these markets.

Some of our critical differentiators include: Broadest platform support: Vserv.mobi is the only ad network with app media across smartphones, tablets and smart feature phones, thus providing advertisers unparalleled reach and engagement.

Unique Go-To-Market strategy: Focus on emerging markets as the sweet spot, with revolutionary products that convert market challenges into opportunities.

Product differentiators • AppWrapper: AppWrapper is the only app monetisation platform in the world that works with ‘one click’, without any coding required from content creators. It helps developers monetise using both premium ads and micro transaction models through a ‘maximum income with minimum effort’ approach. • AudiencePro: AudiencePro is a game-changing platform in mobile advertising that makes Vserv the first ad network in the world to enable an audience profiling layer on its inventory, via telco integration. The platform was created with the objective of enabling audience profiling in a scalable manner through telco integration and blending it with existing ad network parameters. The objective was to enable advertisers to target consumers in a granular fashion using demographics, spending power, network usage, location, content relevance and device-specific data.

Today, we take great pride in being recognised as a company with an aggressive growth path, in addition to being evangelists and thought leaders of the mobile advertising industry.

Can you explain how the monetising module at Vserv works? Plainly put, how does Vserv make money? Our business model is built around facilitating comprehensive monetisation, which includes both advertising and micro transactions. Here are the business models for our main revenue channels:

Advertising: We partner with app developers and publishers to serve ads on their inventory. Advertisers looking to reach users on mobile, pay us for displaying ads on the apps and we share 60% of this revenue with the developers/publishers where these ads are served.

Micro transaction: We partner with app developers and publishers to help them monetise their apps. A developer uses the AppWrapper to enable multiple types of pricing models and can plug in his choice of billing connectivity pipes (app store billing, direct telco billing, etc.).

Users make micro-transactions on the app, such as pay per play or daily subscription, and the developer makes a revenue share with us on the EUP (end user price). We offer over 90% of the revenues generated from the user to the developer.

What are the new features introduced in 2013? We introduced our AudiencePro platform this year, a platform that has redefined the way targeted advertising is done on the mobile medium. Airtel evaluated our platform and partnered with us to become the first telco to deploy AudiencePro.

We also saw that mobile advertising, while being super targeted, still lacked the key targeting parameters (like demographics and spending power) required by brands. While this data exists with different entities across the ecosystem, it is fragmented and, therefore, unusable in a scalable manner. By bridging this gap, the AudiencePro platform has allowed mobile advertising to achieve its full potential in the emerging markets. It now operates as a mass media that offers unprecedented audience targeting.

The platform allows advertiser targeting based on demographics, spending power, network usage, location, content relevance and device-specific data, to reach the right audience. The platform also supports all creative formats, including impactful rich media formats such as full screen ads, video and HTML5 interactive ads.

Can you share a roadmap and what can we see from Vserv in the near future? Our goal is to become the #1 mobile ad network and app monetisation platform across the emerging markets. The company’s aim is to become a $100 million company by 2015. We are rapidly expanding our services across more countries in regions like Latin America, the Middle East and Africa. We will continue to roll out innovative platforms and products that will help push the mobile ecosystem forward.

Over the past three years, we have been steadfastly ramping up our technology innovation engine to solve the unmet challenges of global mobile app developers.

If you (Mr Dippak Khurana) want to develop an app independently, what concept will you choose? Will it be free or paid? And how will you promote it? Although the app economy is growing rapidly, there are a few areas like government services or healthcare that still have a lot of scope for innovative services, especially in the emerging markets. Basic government services covering passport processing, RTI, municipal corporations, Aadhaar cards, etc., need to be available on one centralised platform for easy access. A mobile app can play a very important role in collating, disseminating and accessing these services, thus helping people cut down on precious time. The app can be based on a ‘freemium’ model, promoted through mobile ads.