Last week AT&T Interactive staked its claim as the largest local-mobile ad network in the US. The company said it now serves more than 1 billion local-mobile (mostly in-app) ads every month.
Joanna MacFarland, Executive Director of the YP Local Publisher Network, told me last week that, “Our publishers are seeing higher 75% fill rates . . . [and] 3X higher CPMs than they’ve seen with other, remnant ad networks.” (She wouldn’t name names but “remnant” means networks such as AdMob.)
MacFarland positioned the AT&T mobile network in the “niche” between publisher-sold inventory and general mobile ad networks. She said that AT&T’s mobile publisher partners have “far more inventory than supply,” meaning consumer page views than ads to monetize them.
Some time ago Flurry Analytics did an exercise where the company speculated what in-app mobile advertising would be worth today if all US pageviews were monetized at a $2.50 CPM. The answer is: more than all of PC-based online advertising.
Right now AT&T isn’t specifically selling mobile impressions to SMBs; they’re part of an overall traffic package. But mobile will likely be a separate ad product in 2012.
The other way that AT&T is expanding its reach is through a new, formal reseller program. The first “premium partner” announced is SuperMedia:
AT&T Interactive and SuperMedia announced today an agreement for SuperMedia media consultants to offer YP subscription-based advertising products nationwide to small businesses beginning in the first quarter of 2012.
SuperMedia is the first premier channel partner to join the new YP Authorized Reseller Program from AT&T Interactive. The reseller program will also be available to other premium resellers in the near future, who will supplement the coverage of AT&T’s local advertising sales force – which is the largest in the industry.
This new program is a challenge to CityGrid as the major local-network traffic alternative to Google and SEM. Said an AT&T representative in email to me this morning:
Resellers who are part of the new program now have an alternative to search engines to generate leads and create local advertising campaigns for advertisers. SuperMedia is the first reseller to join the new YP Authorized Reseller Program. For AT&T, the addition of SuperMedia adds to its advertiser reach already established by AT&T’s local industry leading sales force of more than 5,000.
There have been informal traffic sharing relationships among YP publishers in the past but this is the first time (to my knowledge) that a second publisher will be officially “repping” the ad products of another publisher-competitor. One could argue this move is about five years overdue.
But better late . . .
