Big mergers and acquisitions tend to happen a lot in the world of ad tech. The headlines love to focus on the sale price and reasons behind the move, but rarely do we see the effect on publishers who were working with one platform and now have to switch to or find another. 

The truth is that these kinds of changes can inject a lot of stress into publishers’ lives, and if it isn’t stress, it’s dozens of questions and concerns. There’s no doubt that this is exactly what’s going on in the minds of mobile app publishers who were working with MoPub, which AppLovin recently acquired for a little over $1 billion.

We’re here to help. In this post, the Playwire team walks you through what happened with the MoPub acquisition, what app publishers like you need to do, how the change affects you and alternatives to AppLovin migration. Read on.

Sure, you can migrate from MoPub to MAX and keep doing what you were doing, but isn’t a new SDK integration the perfect time to ask for more? Playwire is here to give you more. Reach out to us to learn how we can boost your revenue.

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About AppLovin’s MoPub Acquisition and Migration

In October of 2021, AppLovin and Twitter, which owned MoPub, announced that AppLovin would acquire MoPub. That sale was completed on Jan. 3, for a cash buy of $1.05 billion. While MoPub was profitable for Twitter, the company had made clear that it planned to pursue other avenues for revenue. This change in direction came not long after Apple announced major changes to how apps and advertisers could track users.

When the deal closed, MoPub had just north of 45,000 mobile apps managing their monetization on its platform, reaching a total of nearly 1.5 billion users globally. 

Investors in both of the involved companies likely had their own opinions about the acquisition of MoPub, but for the tens of thousands of app publishers working with MoPub, it meant only one thing: removing MoPub’s software development kit (SDK) integration and getting AppLovin’s SDK integrated.

In other words, publishers found themselves looking down the barrel of a big technical headache and the hairy technical details of a big change in their SDK integration. But to keep the app revenue flowing, MoPub publishers will have to make a change by March 31, 2022, when MoPub will discontinue its platform.

You’re Redoing Your SDK Integration. Is It Time for a Change?

You’re in a season of change. Your SDK integration is changing because AppLovin acquired MoPub. AppLovin is asking mobile publishers to migrate to its platform, which is called MAX.

If you’re operating on autopilot, that makes sense. But you are running a business. You want to ask yourself whether what you’ve been doing with MoPub is where you want to be and whether something better may be out there. 

When you can’t avoid spending the time and effort of integrating a new SDK, why not take a look around and see what else is available? Even small differences in eCPMs, customer service and various other metrics could amount to millions of dollars in additional revenue, depending on your scale.

Why Switch from MoPub to Playwire?

It’s closing time at MoPub, and the platform has basically echoed the classic bartender refrain: You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here. In other words, you’re switching SDKs, but you don’t have to switch to MAX.

This is the part where we throw our hat into the ring. Here’s why you should consider Playwire as your mobile app revenue partner.

SDK

Making Your Revenue More Intelligent with Revenue Intelligence®

Playwire has spent years perfecting the art of increasing top line revenue and CPMs for publishers. All that work — the theorizing, developing, testing and optimizing — has amounted over the years to a proprietary technology we call Revenue Intelligence. 

Any new ad partner you choose, including Playwire, will have their own supply of direct demand that can run in your inventory in addition to programmatically sold inventory. On the programmatic side in particular, it's up to the algorithm to source the highest possible bids from dozens of third party demand sources. And that's exactly where Playwire's RI algorithm truly stands out.

To put it simply, Playwire has built an enormous warehouse of publisher data, as well as a machine that uses that data to make smart decisions about endless variables for every impression to maximize yield. It works really well, and it gets smarter every day. You can learn more about Revenue Intelligence here.

A Long History with Header Bidding

In-app header bidding has been around for a few years now, and the majority of app revenue partners you could choose are doing header bidding for publishers at this point. But the Playwire team can confidently say we have been working with header bidding platforms longer than any traditional app revenue partner platform. Our history in header bidding and video header bidding for web publishers goes back more than a decade.

Why should you care? Because we’re really, really good at header bidding — the kind of good that only comes with more than a decade of experience. We’ve seen many app partners nearly double their revenue on display ads alone when they make the switch to Playwire.

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Machine-Powered, Human-Analyzed

Many traditional app revenue partners are, at this point, just algorithms. Some really smart people built an algorithm that helps publishers do things like programmatic and header bidding and makes basic optimizations automatically. That’s pretty cool — we have something like that ourselves — but if it’s just an algorithm, it’s missing something.

It’s missing the human element. You need real, live human beings analyzing your performance every single day. No machine can monitor performance in that way. That’s why the Playwire team relies on the computing power of machine learning and AI but leaves the daily performance analysis and optimization strategy to the expert humans who work for us.

The other key benefit of the human element, of course, is customer service. If you haven’t experienced customer service horror stories yourself, you’ve at least heard about publishers stuck in the ninth circle of automated customer service while something is broken and they’re losing thousands of dollars an hour. Sometimes, you need to talk to a human, which is why Playwire’s customer service puts people and publishers first.

Ready to Give Your App Revenue a Boost?

If you are working with MoPub, you have to make a big switch anyway — why not see if you can get something out of the switch? If you switch to Playwire, what you get is a dedicated team of live human beings managing your revenue, our AI-powered Revenue Intelligence platform and, in the end, the revenue you know your app deserves.

Let’s make that happen for you. We’ll take you through every step, from migration and setup to optimizations and detailed reporting. To get started, all you have to do is drop us a line, just contact us online.

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