Four years ago, Reporo debuted as a mobile social mdia network that became a mobile advertising network after sites like Facebook and MySpace went mobile. Thanks to a spectacular Business plan and hard work, the company has gone from 30 million ad impressions per month over its own three sites 15 months ago to taking on new clients and posting close to 3 billion ad impressions last month.
“The advertisers asked us to find more traffic,” explains Ben Keirle, global publishing manager of Reporo. “So we took on more and more publishers and it just snowballed. And it’s not stopping. Our goal is to hit 4 billion by the middle of this year, and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t make it.”
Reporo does business with publishers on a revenue share basis giving a 60 percent share to clients.
The reason for this incredible growth is that Reporo filled a virtual vacuum for a mobile advertising network in the adult arena. The company serves publishers of adult content that have mobile optimized websites with traffic from around the world who want to see their revenues vastly increased.
“For example,” says Keirle, “somebody may be set up in the U.S. with a mobile site that gets traffic from the U.K., Australia and South Africa as well as the U.S. and Canada. That publisher is not in position to find advertisers that are targeting his particular profile of traffic in those territories. Selling directly is an arduous task and probably a quite expensive one. Reporo bridges the gap for those publishers by setting up a network that allows us to put ads on his site. This way, if the page is served in the U.K. for example, we’ll serve it with ads from advertisers who are looking to target that particular profile of traffic in the U.K. So the publishers earn money from serving ads on our network and the advertisers benefit from our network because we have a large number of publishers and ad impressions in the territories which they want to target. They can buy from us in bulk across a selection of sites without doing the arduous task of going out and finding every single site that has been targeted in those countries and having to make separate negotiated deals.
“We offer them a one-stop shop where they come to us and simply make a bid for a certain profile of traffic.”
Reporo does business with publishers on a revenue share basis giving a 60 percent share to clients. But to attract new publishers, the firm now offers a special introductory deal in which they allow the new client to keep all of the gross revenues from their inventory sales of the first month, before getting the 60 percent share thereafter. In addition to this offer, Reporo also recently introduced its Turbo Redirect Model.
“Imagine you have a website with 1 million visitors a day,” Keirle explains. “Between 4-to-9 percent on average of all websites now are being accessed from a handheld device. That means up to 90,000 of your million visitors come from a mobile device and if you don’t have a mobile optimized website, you can’t make money from those people. So the webmaster has to design a mobile optimized portion to his site, but most people don’t have the time, money or resources at this stage to do that. What has been happening is that the webmasters send their mobile traffic off to a mobile affiliate campaign just so they can make some money out of it. But it’s not as much money as they’d get if they were running their own mobile optimized site.
“Through our Turbo Redirect Model we have advertisers all over the world, so we redirect, according to their [visitors’] geographic location and according to their handset, to the advertisers that want that traffic and can convert it at the lowest possible ratio and the highest possible price. So instead of redirecting their mobile traffic to an affiliate campaign, Reporo effectively becomes the affiliate campaign. But we pay them per redirect. In the end they receive about four times the revenue they would get anywhere else.”
Reporo is making a big push to add new publishers to its list of clients right now, having more than enough advertisers who are pleased with staying beneath their maximum target cost per customer acquisition. The benefit to the publisher is clear, because they’re getting the maximum amount of revenue from every single advertiser without having to do anything. And according to Keirle, as publishers grow bigger it becomes harder for them to sell advertising and therefore a network like Reporo becomes highly attractive.
“The advertisers also benefit by charging on a CPC [costper-click] basis,” Keirle adds. “The actual CPC varies based on a number of factors. If you’re based in Germany for example, and you have five advertisers all looking to target the same profile of traffic, they bid against each other and the cost rises until it doesn’t become profitable for some of them, who drop out. This way you’re left with one advertiser who can afford to pay the highest possible amount, which means the highest possible CPC is being paid in that particular territory.
“As a business we try to create as much competition as possible until we get to a point where we sell out first. We’ve been at sellout point for six months and every time we take on new traffic it sells out straight away. This is why we’re starting the new marketing campaign to drive more traffic and find new publishers.”
According to Keirle, Reporo still is the only ad network that exclusively targets mobile adult business, which is why the firm has exploded in little more than one year.
“It’s our sole focus,” he says. “We’re not a publisher. We’re not interested in having our own product. We don’t produce any content. We don’t act as an agent and sell advertising campaigns specifically targeted to one publisher. We’re an advertising network. We’re only in mobile and only in the adult sector. Thanks to this focus, we deliver a higher CPC for our publishers.”
