TY - JOUR TI - Ads in mobile applications DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3DV1HM3 PY - 2012 AB - The usage of mobile applications has increased phenomenally with the growth of smart phones. According to Apple, as of Feb 2012, close to 800,000 third party applications were available on the App Store. They have been downloaded more than 15 billion times. The android platform is close behind with 450,000 apps in Google Play that have been downloaded more than 10 billion times. When we look at Advertising revenues from mobile phones (app and browser included), in-app mobile Ads account for only a fraction of the total. IDC estimates 70% of Mobile Ad budgets are spent on search based advertising. The rest is a combination of placements in applications and content on the web. Compared to the application usage statistics for popular platforms, the revenue generated through Ads using these apps as the medium has just not kept pace. The numbers point to a lot of scope for growth. Moreover, with more and more apps becoming free to download, these Ads are here to stay. What makes in-app mobile Ads even more interesting is their potential to deliver highly targeted Ads. In this paper, we study Ads in mobile applications. We limit the scope of our study to in-app mobile Ads, that appear anywhere within a mobile application when it is being used. This could be in the form of text, rich media or banner. Our purpose is to understand how Ads in mobile apps work and how they can be used by advertisers to engage audiences with targeted Ads. To this end, we run Ad campaign experiments in select countries in Asia and North America. Through these experiments; we aim to study the factors affecting the performance of Ad campaigns and inferences that can be made from data obtained through the campaigning process KW - Computer Science KW - Application software KW - Cell phone advertising KW - Smartphones LA - eng ER -