Android in South East Asia

While the worldwide CTR for Android is down, however, the CTR for Android phones in South East Asia is far higher than for any other platform. Sadly, Smaato only publishes a comparative index doesn't release the actual click-through rates for all the ad networks it supports. Because of this, it isn't clear if this just means that the CTR for all the other platforms in South East Asia simply dropped, or if the usage patterns for Android phones in countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines are very different from the worldwide average.

Who Clicks on Mobile Ads? Symbian and Feature Phone Users

Surprisingly, users with Web-enabled feature phones are far more likely to click on ads than those on most smartphone platforms, even though the user experience is likely to be far inferior to clicking on an ad on a smartphone.

According to Smaato's analysis, Symbian users are more likely to click on ads while surfing the Web on their devices than users on any other platform. While we can only speculate as to why this is the case, chances are that this has more to do with the different user demographics than the actual user experience on these devices.

For more details from Smaato's report, including fill rates for different ad networks and data from previous reports, head over the company's website.

How it Works

With FeaturedUsers, any Twitter user can go to the site and sign up to purchase impressions across a network of eighteen different Twitter affiliate applications. You can see the complete list here. The cost to the user is $10 per 1000 impressions (CPM). Each impression is essentially just a banner add that displays the Twitter user's name, profile, and link to their Twitter account. After PayPal fees, which is how publishers pay, revenues are split 60/40 in favor of the publisher. So far, even with very little press, the site has been busy. They've yet to have a time when there weren't any sales. In fact, they currently have a padding of about 7 days out. As the padding increases, they add another publisher to the mix. Reagan tells us there's quite a waiting list for that already.

After a Twitter user buys impressions, the affiliate sites display these using a simple line of Javascript code. Reagan also put a lot of safeguards into the system to make sure that both the Twitter user and the publisher get the most bang for the buck. For example, there's an IP limit which is currently set at 30 impressions per 24 hours. If any particular IP address starts showing up far too many times in the log files, it probably means a particular user has been refreshing the page over and over again. Those extra impressions won't get counted.

Another provision is especially designed to protect the publishers. If the clickthrough rate on the banners drops below 0.6%, FeaturedUsers stops charging for impressions until it increases again. According to Reagan, this should encourage the publishers to move the Twitter banner ad to a more prominent position on their site where the rate will be better.

What About Spammers?

Of course, these days, there is some concern that spammers and others up to no good could use the system to promote their own, terrible Twitter profiles. But, Reagan thinks the very fact that you have to pay for impressions will keep those sorts of users at bay for the most part. He also thinks that even if they were to get through, they wouldn't see much value for their dollars spent since visitors clicking through to their profiles probably wouldn't follow the spammer's account.

Still, if there's a certain Twitter profile that a publisher doesn't like for whatever reason - maybe it's spammy, maybe it's too risque, etc. - the publisher has the right to block it from showing on their page.

Coming Soon: Geo-targeting, Contextual Profiles, and More

In the next couple of weeks, FeaturedUsers will launch a geo-targeting feature that will show you profiles of Twitter users from your area when you visit the affiliate sites - a move that should definitely help to increase the clickthrough rate on the ads. Next month, they'll add another feature called "contextual profiles" which will match keywords from a Twitter user's profile to a tag cloud of words that represent the affiliate site. This process will be used to better match up Twitter users and the sites their banners are shown on.

The publishers dashboard page will soon be updated, too. Now it shows things like the domain clickthough rate, the amount of money paid and owed, and the total page impressions. After the update, publishers will have the ability to add new domains and blacklist certain IP addresses - like their own home or work IP - so those don't get counted as impressions.

When Twitter oAuth leaves beta, FeaturedUsers will then let Twitter users claim their account and turn on certain options like having the banner display your latest tweet, for example. Reagan found static profile banners performed better, but wants to at least provide this option for those who want it.

Get Some Free Impressions!

Want some free impressions on this new network? We have 4000 impressions to give away. The first eight commenters who leave their Twitter username below will receive 500 impressions each.