Luxshmi Investments, a social networking and mobile-based holding company, recently introduced a new marketplace aimed directly at publishers and advertisers of mobile sites. More specifically, the platform targets banner advertising on mobile devices, allowing clients to direct their advertising to specific demographic groups of users.
The platform, called AdBid, which is accessible via AdBid.mobi, is a clean, organized community of both publishers and advertisers that can buy, sell, and bid on banner-ads from a central platform accessible via both mobile devices and PCs.
Like other ad-based marketplaces, AdBid allows you to create and fund a new account, create your mobile site, and then search plausible banner ads to monetize the new site. You can search through available ads via demographic variables that allow you to target your advertising to your mobile site’s audience. While this is nothing new, the company states their reason for creating AdBid was their frustration that there weren’t any large-scale communities for mobile-based banner advertising. In addition, most marketplaces are focused on text-based ads for mobile sites, which aren’t as effective as image/banner ads.
While the platform looks extremely easy to use, and offers mobile-based stats and reporting, I have only one major concern, which is do they really want to compete with Google’s introduction of mobile-banner serving via AdWords? It’s the same overall principal; however advertisers involved with AdWords have a much larger community of publishers to help spread their message. On the flip side, publishers have a much larger inventory of available advertisers and the targeting is done for them by the AdWords algorithm, instead of by hand. Maybe AdBid is seeking the niche aspect, and trying to do only one thing well, instead of being cluttered with options like AdWords
That aside, the BETA introduction looked to be a huge success for AdBid. It was launched May 1st, and by the next day, they had already served over 34,000 ads via their publisher network. This resulted in over 4,400 clicks within the first 24 hours. By the 10th of May, they had already reached the milestone of achieving over 100,000 ads served.