Interview: “In-app advertising to be the next destination for advertisers,” says Arpit Jain, Founder of GreedyGame

In a conversation with TechGraph, GreedyGame’s founder & CEO said, “There is no doubt that in-app advertising is going to be the next destination for advertisers.”

Here is the full transcript: 

TechGraph: Before we start the interview. Can you please let our readers know more about GreedyGame?

Arpit Jain: GreedyGame was started in 2013 with a futuristic vision of solving the monetization issues of app publishers and being the pioneers in the field of native advertising.

Having, a wide reach among publishers within and outside India in our clientele, we are solving a unique problem of monetizing apps and games using ads, without having to disrupt the user experience.

TechGraph: What was the story behind the launch of GreedyGame?

Arpit Jain: During my college days, I saw the increasing popularity of gaming apps amongst my peers. While the affinity of games was clear, there was one common concern. The prominence prominence of intrusive ads on gaming apps. 

I wanted to solve the fundamental problem for mobile publishers and advertisers – how to run ads without disrupting the user experience? The result was GreedyGame, India’s largest end-to-end implementation, mediation, and optimization platform for Native Ads on Mobile. 

The company is funded by renowned investor institutions such as Times Internet and angel investors including Ankit Nagori from Curefit, Sujeet Kumar from Udaan, Ravi Garikipati from Davinta, Anuj Choudhary from Aalgro, and others. The company raised govt funds from IIT Ropar E-cell, was selected under NASSCOM’s 10,000 startup program, and won the Techinasia Startup Arena India edition in 2016. 

TechGraph: How do native ads look like these days?

Arpit Jain: Native ads look exactly as the name implies – Native. Native to the content of the media platform they are placed in. To put it simply, these are the kind of ads that blend in keeping the user experience pleasant, resulting in higher user retention as well as maximum monetization for the app publishers. 

At GreedyGame, we know that in the time to come native advertising is going to be the next big thing. According to Statista, third-party Gaming and Non-Gaming mobile app advertising revenue are estimated at ~$600m in 2020 by Indian publishers and out of this, 15-20% of revenue accounts for native ads. 

We have worked with 100+ gaming apps where we have seen an increase of 20-40%  overall ad revenue. Specifically, Nextwave Multimedia was able to generate 30% additional revenue month-on-month for their app, WCC2, with native ads.

Almost all the internet giants, including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube use native ads (in-feed ads in your feed are native ads). The biggest roadblock with native is that it requires additional developer bandwidth, experience, and experimentation (A/B testing) to figure out the best native ads for your app.  

Our unique SDK enables the publishers to creatively customize ads native to their unique app UI and A/B test on the go. We help publishers utilize the power of native ads without having to spend any additional bandwidth.

TechGraph: How GreedyGame ads value in programmatic ad tech space?

Arpit Jain: Programmatic has become the biggest mode of buying ads globally, more so in Tier-1 countries as it is transparent, limits fraud, and publishers can generate the right market value for their ad placements based on real time bids from multiple advertisers. 

Since traditional display formats like banner/interstitials are scalable by design and easy to implement, a lot of publishers can expose it to programmatic channels easily. But, there are few challenges for publishers to integrate and expose native supply – ensure viewability, policy compliance, and dynamic templates to render different contents in native ads. 

We solve that for publishers and are enabling more and more publishers to expose their customized (native) ad placements to programmatic buyers and increase their earnings further.

Based on our publisher data, we saw about 30% of our publishers were already running Native Ads and had exposure to programmatic demand. For the rest 70%, we helped them add native units in their apps and open programmatic demand through SDK-X.  

TechGraph: How do you prepare for the highly disruptive digital ads space?

Arpit Jain: We started GreedyGame with a mission to empower mobile developers to develop world-changing apps and build the most engaging games without constantly worrying about revenue. We believe in making cutting edge products and delivering quality end to end services. Hence, we created an end-to-end implementation, mediation, and optimization platform for ads.

We have our SDK-X which is a one-stop-shop for app developers. Our SDK-X is developed in a way that developers can sign up, integrate the app & start monetizing within hours.

It provides fast and easy integration with native ads, dynamic ad creation, ML-based optimization, mediation between different formats, and demand partners.

Having partnered with the biggest companies in the ad tech space, we are at the forefront of technological advances happening in the industry and keep all our products and services updated to the present demands.

We already have 200+ app publishers working with us and we are all set to work with 1000+ publishers in 2021.

TechGraph: What GreedyGame is doing to tackle ads fraud?

Arpit Jain: GreedyGame works with its SDK which ensures the authenticity of the user by direct verification. We generate data points for user interactions with Ads which enables us to learn about user behavior and use them to combat fraud if any. Since this data is available in realtime, our systems can deal with changes and take action immediately.

TechGraph: The past few months have been challenging for businesses. How did you deal with the pandemic?

Arpit Jain: Surprisingly it has been the opposite for us. Our data shows that 63% of our user base is gaming based, followed by utility & lifestyle at around 27%. The whole COVID situation brought a huge influx of gaming app users. 50% of mobile app users play games, second only to social media and communications apps in terms of time spent. With mobile phone penetration reaching 820 Mn users by 2022, it is evident that we are building a product for the large young demographic.

For a software company like ours, mitigating WFH wasn’t difficult. We have always followed an open culture with our employees where people have complete ownership of their products/roles, and this openness has helped us during WFH times as people didn’t need to wait before taking any decisions and this helped them in taking quick decisions as well. 

TechGraph: Have you noticed any rise or fall on your platform during this phase?

Arpit Jain: The pandemic presented an opportunity in the mobile application space. Because people worldwide as well as in India have easy access to smartphones, the time spent on mobile has been increasing exponentially. We witnessed a surge on our platform both because of the lockdown and the IPL season. 

IPL in general presents a huge opportunity for capturing the eyeballs of the Indian Audience. GreedyGame registered a growth of 10X in terms of overall traffic and 6X in terms of revenues for Developers focused on this domain.

There is an increasing interest of big brands to explore in-app advertising format because of their exceptional results and seamless integration. 

Having said that, there is no doubt that in-app advertising is going to be the next destination for advertisers. There are increasing tech investments which implies that investors also see this as a potential genre of advertising.