Mobile advertising company Medialets has raised $6 million in Series B funding led by the Foundry Group, with participation from DFJ Gotham, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups and Chris Saridakis. This brings Medialets’ total funding up to $10 million.
Medialets launched in 2008 with Feedburner-like model of free developer tools except for mobile ad application analytics. But as the mobile ad network market saturated, Medialets’ CEO Eric Litman decided to take the company in a different direction. The company began developing rich media ad formats and saw a strong response from both brands and publishers.
Last year, Medialets shifted its strategy from being a full-fledged ad network to helping publishers sell rich media ads directly to brands. On the publisher side, Medialets provides all the tools to go and sell ad inventory for mobile rich media ads independently and trains publishers’ salesforce as well. For brands, Medialets evangelizes their ad formats and the mobile ad opportunities provided by big-name publishers, serving as a middle man between publishers like CNN and advertisers like Coca-Cola.
The company is now one of the most widely used ad platforms and counts NPR, CNN and Fox as publisher clients.
Of course, Medialets also offers its rich media ads to developers who use mobile ad networks; providing a universal SDK that allows publishers to modify and change their ad tags from various networks without having to update their app. The company offers the SDK for iPhone, Android and iPad platforms. Currently the SDK works with Jumptap, Mojiva and a number of other ad networks, but Litman says they are in negotiations with other mobile ad networks as well. Litman ads that Medialets’ reach is in the “dozens of millions.”
The cornerstone to Medialets’ ads, as we’ve written in the past, is the promise that its rich media and display advertising on mobile phones will provides deeper engagement with users. Engagement is the primary measurement that the ad platform focuses on when determining the success of its advertising campaigns. But developers and advertisers may be more beholden to click-through rates, which Medialets claim are between 1 and 8 percent.
While Litman declined to give us specifics about sales, he said that Medialets’ revenue is doubling month over month. This is not surprising considering the fast growth that other mobile advertising platforms, such as Millennial Media, Google’s AdMob and even Apple’s iAd, are seeing in the space. And Litman says that mobile advertising is going to be a $12 to $14 billion market by 2014. “We want to be defacto standard for rich media advertising in mobile,” says Litman.
