I’m happy to report that Pinch Media has launched its second product, Pinch Advertising. Like Pinch Analytics before it, Pinch Advertising is a drop-in library for your iPhone SDK applications. It’s integrated with your application by means of a few method calls, and makes it easy for developers to make money from their free applications through in-application ads.
We would have launched Pinch Advertising sooner, but like all new advertising services, we faced a chicken-and-egg problem - what comes first, the advertisers or the developers? I didn’t want to put an ad library out there and start signing up developers without having advertisers. This ‘developers as bait’ approach sometimes works, but it doesn’t respect your time. I also resisted the urge to go out with a single marquee advertiser that could cover some of the bigger applications in our network, since I wanted a solution that could work for every iPhone application developer that wanted to use our platform. Eventually I decided the best approach would be to partner up - by working with a larger company with a strong sales force and good advertiser relationships, I could hopefully serve everyone that wanted to use Pinch Advertising immediately.
It took a while to find the right partner, but we did - Pinch Media is now working with JumpTap, a comprehensive provider of advertising solutions for the mobile Internet. I’ve talked a lot with the members of JumpTap’s executive team, and they get it - they understand the iPhone environment is special, the user experience is critical, and we’re a developer-centric business. I’m thrilled that JumpTap’s experienced sales team is going to be finding the best ads for Pinch Media’s network of applications. I’m also thrilled that they’re selling in-application advertising alongside their web advertising, because it means they can potentially combine the two into a single advertising buy. I was up nights trying to think of ways that we could help the most iPhone developers, including iPhone developers who are just starting out and don’t have a lot of application traffic. It’s very difficult to sell advertising when you don’t have that large audience - and in advertising terms, the entire iPhone application market combined is still relatively small. Well, now that small audience can be part of something bigger, to everyone’s benefit.
Here at Pinch Media, we’re focused on making the Pinch Advertising framework as unobtrusive as possible, minimizing its memory footprint and processor use. We make sure we request ads before its time to show them and cache them on the client side, so we can minimize or eliminate ad loading times. We do the same thing with our reporting, storing events locally and sending them off only when there’s a valid connection. And of course we focus on the user experience, making sure our advertising units can be incorporated into your application in an attractive manner that won’t alienate your users.
To get started with Pinch Advertising, sign up for an account with us. Then, you’ll tell us a little bit about your application by creating a new one. After you’ve created it, the ‘enroll’ link for Pinch Advertising will appear on your left. We’ll look at the information you’ve provided about your application, check out the application if it’s in the AppStore - although you’re welcome to apply beforehand - and get in touch with you to learn more about your application. (The more we know, the better we can serve you and your users.) Then we’ll get you more information, including a full Terms of Service and our Pinch Advertising library.
A lot more information on Pinch Advertising will be made public in the days ahead, both on our public-facing website and in the developer portal. In the meantime, if you have any questions, please get in touch.
