Native Ads That Scale: Twitter Acquires Namo Media

Namo Media was one of MoPub’s main competitors as they offered an SDK that allowed developers to easily integrate native advertising into the feeds within their apps. They connected into multiple ad exchanges to dynamically fill ad inventory using existing assets and copy, adding the flexibility and scale mobile native ads were in need of. It was their SDK that was the main differentiator to MoPub, but Twitter’s offering obviously had more scale.

Now it appears Twitter has acquired the company in search of technological improvements to MoPub. Should be exciting news for mobile advertisers who can easily port over existing assets into native streams. If you can’t beat em, join em!  

Twitter’s MoPub Showcases Native Ads To All Publishers

Four months after initially putting support for native advertising into beta, Twitter’s mobile exchange, MoPub, is putting the solution up for all publishers to leverage. The idea is for MoPub’s native product to serve as a complete solution for native ads; including a native ads SDK and a publisher-side ad server. The former can be used to create a customized ad unit inside of an app, and the latter allows publishers to traffic their own ad campaigns into native areas, complete with integrated reporting. However, nothing from this post necessarily suggests that data from Twitter will be integrated as a targeting feature. It’s a sign, though, that Twitter is very intentionally expanding bit by bit into this increasingly monetarily viable space. 

Twitter Acquires MoPub

Twitter has been building clout as an advertising platform for all of 2013, and their acquisition of startup MoPub is another piece of the puzzle.  MoPub helps mobile publishers manage their ad inventory, and by owning them, Twitter has shown an increased focus on revenue generation.  This acquisition will serve to maximize Twitter’s own ad space, increasing the effectiveness of ads running across the entire platform, but will also add revenue from other companies using MoPub’s service to develop native advertising strategies, like WordPress, Flixter, Ngmoco, and OpenTable.