Helium In-App Bidding - Increase Revenue With More Demand Than Ever

Programmatic advertising and in-app bidding is now the leading technology of monetization for mobile app developers. Facebook Audience Network announced last week that they are on track to have 50% of revenue transacted through bidding before the end of 2020.However, more improvements in transparency and tools are needed to fully capture the opportunity of programmatic. Chartboost is at the forefront of these challenges by introducing the first transparent bidding solution, Helium by Chartboost, with new demand for developers.Today, we're announcing a major expansion and improvement of Helium: our latest update adds new demand partners and revamps the architecture to give you access to more demand than ever through a hybrid setup.Real-time bidding has been hailed as the major improvement for mediation, because it allows all the competing networks to put in their bids at the moment an ad is needed through a fair auction environment. This results in higher revenue for mobile app developers, which is very different to how waterfall mediation works where networks are arranged in a stacked choice setup, which always prefers some networks.But while real-time bidding is undoubtedly the future, non-bidding or waterfall mediation is still the only way to access some networks. That's why Helium combines real-time bidding with mediation: our new architecture always gives you the absolute best bid possible.

More demand than ever

Helium now offers access to 30+ demand partners including both bidding networks and mediated networks. Helium is the only in-app bidding solution where you can access Chartboost's demand through bidding. With Helium, publishers will get access to Chartboost's performance and brand demand both from the Chartboost DSP and Chartboost Exchange.Chartboost's DSP is built on proprietary machine learning models and automation in order to target more precisely and optimize the process of buying and bidding on in-app inventory. Chartboost DSP's real-time bidding strategies attribute different performance metrics and tweak bids to acquire the right user for the right price. No two DSPs are exactly alike, where each one has their own way of building out the buying logic and strategies based on data access. With proprietary data and technology, the Chartboost DSP is highly competitive in the market with optimized bidding strategies for Helium's first-look inventory.

Increased efficiency

Helium's new release also changes how Chartboost handles our mediation partners. With this update, all real-time bidding and mediation is done solely through Chartboost, creating a competition for your inventory where only the highest bidder can win.Here's how it works: when an app requests for an ad, Helium simultaneously sends requests to all bidding networks and mediated networks. Helium dynamically merges all real-time bidding CPM prices from bidding networks and publisher-defined or auto-optimized CPM prices from mediated networks, and selects the highest bid as the winner.

Greater flexibility and transparency

Another unique advantage of using Helium is that it's a flexible solution where mobile app developers can either integrate it as a full-stack solution, like our social casino publisher Dynamic Games, or plug it into their proprietary mediation, like our casual game publisher Talefun.Helium provides mobile app developers with full transparency and technology they can trust. Know what's happening in the auction with unique metrics like bid distribution by winning bids and shown impressions. For publishers on proprietary mediation, the Helium SDK returns the winning bid price and bid source to their own auction. Winning bids equals publishers earnings.Helium by Chartboost is a certified app ecosystem partner of Facebook Audience Network and we are dedicated to helping developers make a smooth transitioning to bidding.This is the first post in a short series. In our next post, we'll shed more light on the fine details of several innovative new features in Helium that will help increase your fill rates, maximize eCPM, and improve your A/B testing. If you're ready to get started with Helium's lightweight SDK today, check out chartboost.com/helium, or contact us at helium@chartboost.com!