The Pocket Cyclone

What a ride. iAds where certainly the talk of the day (except Disney buying Tapulous). And my own list of apps with iAds got a nice push from several mentions on large sites, including TUAW. Big thanks and welcome to all the new visitors.

So how did it go?

I would say: Mixed. After pulling the trigger rather late in the day, around 3pm, developers who have apps in the appstore with iAds reported a steady stream of impressions served by Apple. Two ads were spotted, Nissan and Dove. It seems the Apple dashboard, which only developers can access, started to report statistics later that day and they looked good, seems the iAds got pretty good clickthrough rates. This certainly comes partially from the novelty factor the iAds have, but it’s a good start.

One irritating fact that developers report, the dashboard shows all kinds of stats but zero revenue so far. So folks have no idea how successful the iAd integration really turns out for them in terms of revenue.

After the initial push, it seems as if the fill rate of ads quickly went down. I got some numbers through Twitter, they all indicate that the fill rate is very low at this point, <15%!

Means: A large number of apps with high usage frequency try to show more iAds than there is inventory. A lot more. So don’t be surprised if you can’t find an iAd out there. As a developer, if you are used to the well stocked inventory’s of the established ad providers, esp. Google, who provide an endless supply of ads even to apps with super-high usage, this is certainly something to get used to. But as always, the battle will be won by fill rates AND pay-out per ad/click, so it is too early to tell.

Here is an interesting detail from pocketgamer.biz on how a potentially low fill rate will be mitigated: Forcefully. But that is something that anybody who integrates an ad-network already does. You either hide the add-space similar to what “Mirror Free for iPhone 4″ does, or you request ads from several networks until you can serve one, as you can see in “Removem Free”. As a user in the latter case, you will see ads coming in from different providers.

For the curious, looking at free apps that have an exclusive iAd only integration like “Mirror Free for iPhone 4″ or “Air Hockey Gold” serving ads (or not!) will give you a good anecdotal evidence of Apple’s fill rate, aka inventory aka capability to perform substantially in this business. Caveat again, Apple has clearly announced that the full force of the iAd program will hit this fall, so early conclusions are to be handled with care.

More iAd experience on your side? Please share in comments.