In-Application Advertising - HTML5 Advertising - page 216

diverse. This, in turn, creates a lot of extra work for developers and designers creating native apps and HTML5-based
advertisements. This is one of the main reasons that iOS remains very attractive to developers; its user base adopts
(and is capable) of installing the latest OS very quickly, which gives developers an even playing field to deploy content
toward. To better understand this fragmentation, visit http://allthingsd.com/20120920/usage-of-apples-ios-6-
hits-staggering-levels-on-first-day-of-availability , where you'll find that Android's OS adoption rates fails
in comparison to Apple's iOS.
Android still remains a top competitor in the mobile OS landscape, and if you're interested in building
applications for the world's largest mobile operating system, visit http://developer.android.com/sdk/index.html .
Others
Many other mobile operating systems are in the market, including BlackBerry with its App World ( http://appworld.
blackberry.com ) and Windows Phone with its store ( http://windowsphone.com/store ) , but all currently have a very
small slice of the global OS pie compared to iOS and Android. BlackBerry is expected to release its latest and greatest
OS called BlackBerry 10 by 2013, which could be the push that the company so desperately needs. Read more of the
features at http://blackberry.com/BlackBerry-10 .
Windows Phone has also had a slow start with Windows Phone 7, according to research firm Nielsen ( http://
blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/2011/06/30/windows-phone-7-has-thin-sliver-of-u-s-share-nielsen-says ),
but expect big changes because Windows should be taking off with its Windows 8 update, which released in conjunction
with Microsoft's first tablet, called Surface. Windows first coined this new operating system's UI as “Metro” but
has since removed that branding for Windows 8 UI. BlackBerry and Windows remain competitive in the mobile
landscape, and if you're building advertisements that need to deploy across various applications on these OSs, you'll
need to read on to understand how to take advantage of the vastly fragmented mobile market.
In-Application Advertising
You may have guessed that with all of these app stores, the number of users on these devices, and the number of free
applications, it's only a matter of time until advertisers take notice and move some of their ad spend to this emerging
digital outlet. Well, you're exactly correct. In-app advertising is becoming a huge market for developers' revenue
stream when developing native applications for devices. Many content providers and developers are offering their
apps for free with an ad-supported model. Take the very popular game Word with Friends , which runs on any OS and
comes in free and paid versions for users to download. Both games offer very similar experiences to the end user, with
the exception of ads in the free version and no ads in the paid. With millions upon millions of downloads of these
popular games, advertisers are taking notice that the eyes aren't all on desktop or TV any longer, so they're shifting ad
dollars over to where the eyeballs are.
In-application advertising is not really new; in fact, ever since the tablet market was “invented” by the Apple iPad
in 2010, advertising was there, in applications, from day one. For example, the ad server PointRoll served the ad units
shown in Figure 9-2 , the first day the iPad was released to users. Figure 9-2 showcases a rich media Lincoln ad that
was deployed through the TextPlus ( http://textplus.com ) application using the SDK provider AdMarvel on the iPad.