This app aims to give free mobile data to users in emerging markets through advertisements
In addition, PopSlide, a product of YOYO Holdings, also makes ad placement more seamless
Mobile advertisements are a bane for many smartphone users — they are intrusive and sometimes, ugly as well. In fact, according to this year’s Mobile Adblocking report by PageFair, an estimated 419 million — or 22 per cent of the world’s smartphone users — are using an adblocker.
A sizable portion of these users hails from emerging markets as well. In India, the count is at 122 million; in Indonesia, 38 million.
For advertisers, that presents a very urgent problem. Sure, they can campaign to block adblocking software (no pun intended), threaten users with content restriction, but at the end of the day, is that really the best use of resources? Advertisers set themselves to create a big divide between them and users.
What is required is instead, more innovation. YOYO Holdings, a Singapore and Philippines-based mobile startup want to appeal to both advertisers and users by making advertising seamless with user experience, as well as rewarding users who view the advertisements.
e27 speaks to Yosuke Fukada, Founder of YOYO Holdings to dig deeper into the limitations of current ad technology and how YOYO Holdings’s PopSlide product may create a revolution in mobile advertising.
Ad technology has been undergoing advanced development in past few years; video advertising has become quite popular due to the increasing smartphone penetration.
However, most mobile advertising companies focus on ROI and other KPIs such as retargeting and real-time bidding (RTB) to gauge success. In simple terms, it means user impressions or how long and how many users are viewing advertisements.
But merely focussing on these datasets to optimise is a caveat and ultimately, can stifle product innovation.
“Of course, ROI is the most important. However the fundamental of advertising should be faced on users. Most mobile users don’t want to see ads when user are using mobile,” says Fukada.
PopSlide differentiates itself by being positioning itself as a user-centric ad tech company.
“We can deliver comfortable ads to users naturally and the performance of ads is really higher than traditional ads. We believe that only user-centric ads can make the highest performance to an advertiser,” he says.
Enter PopSlide
So, how does the PopSlide app aim to achieve that?
The platform displays full display advertisements on the users’ home screens — similar to the Amazon Kindle; so, the ad engagement experience becomes seamless with the users’ smartphone habits.
“It is a kind of handy billboard ads. In their pocket, there are many high-resolution ads all the time. Even off-line users can see full-displayed ads, so we can show attractive and informative ads 24/7,” says Fukada.
Also Read: The six companies raising the bar for in-content advertising
But the Amazon Kindle ad viewing experience has an incentive for the users — ad-enabled Kindles are priced significantly lower than the ad-free versions.
PopSlide incentivises users to install its app in a different way — by providing free mobile data credits each time an ad is viewed (for prepaid users only).
Fukada claims PopSlide’s mobile ads’ Click-through Rate (CTR) for full-screen advertisements is approximately 20 per cent, which is mighty high when you consider the highest Facebook CTR according to Smart Insights hovers at around 1.28 per cent.
Since PopSlide’s launch in 2014 in four countries — Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and India — it has logged 1.6 million downloads.
An eye on emerging markets
On why YOYO Holdings chose the Philippines as its first country to launch PopSlide, Fukada says:
“First, as a trial market, user feedback is very important to improve our product. Filipino users use English, therefore it is easier for us to communicate with end-users directly. Second, Philippines’s economy market is the middle of Southeast Asia, so we thought the Philippines is a representative model in Southeast Asia. After understanding the Philippines market, we can expand to other South-east Asian markets.”
Fukada also says that PopSlide unique value proposition is a good fit for emerging markets, mainly because the mobile data consumption habits in those markets.
“In Philippines, we can buy an Android device for as low as US$30. According to several reports, the average monthly household income in the Philippines is about US$400. For them, US$30 is not expensive already. The concern for them is the monthly mobile usage cost,” says Fukada.
Also Read: Something is broken in mobile advertising; here are the 4 rules to fix it
“We think it is possible to make mobile Internet for free by using the power of ads. This is the similar logic as TV and radio. We can enjoy watching TV for free because of advertisers. Free service with ads is a traditional model, so we just adjusted and modified for smartphones in emerging markets,” he adds.
Mobile advertising is especially complex in emerging markets. The Average-Revenue-Per-User (ARPU) and Lifetime-Value (LTV) for each customer are low in emerging markets.
“Mobile advertisers in these markets need to find a balance between ARPU and LTV and CPA (cost per acquisition),” says Fukada.
And, through PopSlide, Fukada hopes that mobile advertisers will be able to reach that balance in their business model quicker.
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Disclosure: This article was produced by the e27 content marketing team, sponsored by Gree Ventures.
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