Hey, this is the Daily Overpass, my name is Eric and I make apps! Now today, let's talk
about the death of SDK-less mediation networks!
Alright, so last week Ad Mob sent through an email saying that on May 25th,
the same day that GDPR kicks in (we should talk about
that at some point!), on May 25th they're discontinuing support for SDK-less mediation
networks. So, I did a video about this a couple of years ago, back when it was still fairly
new, all about SDK-less mediation. And for those of you who have never used it or don't
know, it's like being able to use mediation for other networks besides Ad Mob, through
Ad Mob mediation, but not having to include all the different SDK. So, if you were going
to have Facebook audience through your Ad Mob mediation, you have to include all the
SDK's for Facebook, and all the other different ones that you use, and that kind of bloats
the size of your application. The thing I thought was really fantastic about SDK-less
mediation was that, like I use corona SDK on a lot of applications, and corona SDK only
supported Ad Mob and a few other networks, so using something like an SDK-less mediation
network meant I could just use a bunch of different networks too. Although, there were
only like four different SDK-less mediations, and one of them was smaato, S - M - A - A
- T - O, and I think I've spoken about it once before. So, it was a fantastic idea,
SDK-less mediation networks, but the downside was they all sucked. I've never heard anybody
talk about how great they were. like, the email said that you still have smaato set
up on some of your apps. Smaato is so bad that I didn't even realise I had them set
up still, I thought I'd disabled them, but I checked and I still do have some of them
set up, they just don't make any money at all. So I was really hoping that it would
work. Its terrible, for years I've been trying to make the mediation thing work a bit better
and I only have three different networks, I've got AppLovin, Ad Mob and Facebook Audience
network, and sometimes I'll shut off AppLovin for a while, if it get's too low and it's
just siphoning off money when it gets really low. So anyway, what they're replacing it
with is called Ad Mob open bidding and to be honest with you, I didn't even know anything
about it, I guess it was announced on the 22nd of March. And this is another way of
doing things, a bit like SDK-less mediation except it's done through open bidding, so
rather than relying on historical ECPM, so the CPM's go up and down and it relies on
the past performance, it's gonna rely on the bids, so you get bids from different networks
and it would automatically take the highest bid, so sounds fantastic, I need to start
using that thing. So it sounds like there's a lot of innovation going on there, and I'm
really kind of exited about it! So, like I said, I've been trying to get mediation to
work better for years. One of the things I did early on was, when I found out that you
can set up all these different mediation networks and so the highest one will go to, so if Ad
Mob happened to be low you'd go to AppLovin, if AppLovin happened to be low you'd go to
Chartboost, or whatever the different ones are. There's so many ad networks that you've
never heard of, it's like going to a festival where you've heard of a few bands, but most
of them you don't know, that's what ad networks are like. Some of them are just so minor,
there's just a few tadpole ones. Anyway, so early on I went through and I set up ad networks,
I set up all the SDK's for 10 different ad networks, i set up mediation, and what I found
that had happened was, all of a sudden, I was hardly getting any money because it was
all going off into all these different directions, and I was having little pockets of money in
different networks, and it was always lower than the monthly threshold. So it would be
every couple of months i'd get paid from them, and eventually I'd just go and turn them all
off, and I had to go and remove all the SDK's too. The thing about including the SDK's in
your application is not just the SDK's, it's not the size and everything, they usually
have permissions that need to be added and everything like that, it's just a hassle.
So hopefully it'll continue going into the SDK-less way, even though they're not supporting
the official SDK-less mediation networks, but anyway I think it's gonna be pretty cool.
I'm gonna have to look into that thing. Oh! One thing, I'll talk about this in more detail
in a future episode - we just removed every single free app from Apple on our App Store,
and we're just going with paid apps, with the exception of ear spy because that's the
only one that's really been making money lately. We're trying to decrease the amount of apps.
So I won't be able to test it out on Apple ads, but we will test it out on Google. So
anyway, just thought I'd talk a little bit about that today. Hey, how many of you guys,
tell me, because I could be wrong about this, have you used SDK-less mediation while it
still existed? And did it ever support you? Did you ever make any money from it? Because
I've talked to a lot of developers who never have. And, are you using open bidding yet?
I'm not even sure if it's available yet, but are you using it and how are you finding it
to work for you? Because I'd be really interested in knowing that too! Anyway, that's it for
today, I'll talk to you guys tomorrow!