MoPub Report Points To Growth In Video Ads And Super Bowl Spending

The buzz around native and video advertising isn’t just hype — they’re bringing in more dollars for publishers, according to a new report from Twitter-owned MoPub.

MoPub offers ad management tools for mobile publishers, and it releases a quarterly report showing trends across those publishers. The latest report covers the first three months of 2015 and includes data from more than 31,000 mobile apps.

During that quarter, the average publisher running video ads saw their revenue go up 39 percent and their eCPMS (the price paid by advertisers for 1,000 impressions) increase 3.9 percent, compared to the last quarter of 2014. The report also shows the breakdown of native ad revenue by category, with social and entertainment performing the strongest, and a big increase in at least a couple of those categories. (MoPub started supporting native ads for all its publishers about a year ago.)

Product Marketing Manager Jeff Cunning wrote that “native ads expanded beyond apps, where they have been traditionally successful, into new publisher categories such as entertainment, news and lifestyle. While some app categories displayed stronger revenue performance, app developers are finding that native ads are effective across broad categories.”

(And yes, that growth might seem more concrete if the chart included actual dollar numbers, or at least a year-over-year percentage. I asked Twitter, but the company was not able to provide them.)

The report also looks back at the advertising event of Q1, and indeed of the year, namely the Super Bowl. While it’s a huge day for TV advertising, MoPub says mobile advertisers also increased their spending 3.4x during the event. Not surprisingly, brand advertising accounted for the vast majority of that spending, but Cunning said at least one app developer also increased spending by 3.3x during the game.

You can read more about the report at the MoPub blog.