Interview: Ben Keirle of Reporo

London-based Reporo operates a mobile ad network that includes a slew of quality brands among its publishers. It also operates the Mwah mobile social network, which has built up a large user base over the last few years. The company’s network of hundreds of advertisers target their campaigns based on territory, handset and billing options. Reporo gives the advertisers only the users they can convert and they pay the highest CPR (cost per redirect) for this targeting. Director of Business Development Ben Keirle kindly answered AVN's questions in this interview that originally ran in the Webmaster Access show guide. What are the most significant trends you are seeing in terms of consumer interaction with adult content on mobile devices? Is it getting easier or harder to monetize mobile traffic? As a network we see which types of products get clicked the most and of course who pays the most for those clicks. This varies enormously from one geo to another dependant predominantly on the device and mindset of a user. For example, our highest-spending and highest-paying buyers in the USA are casual dating and male enhancement products as opposed to VOD. Of course we have a number of VOD buyers, but these products are for a user prepared to pay for an HD/niche experience instead of being satisfied with a free experience—of course, the same could be argued that whilst only a percentage of these people are happy to pay for that, almost everyone is happy to pay for a site that promises to get them laid! How effective has your Branded Redirect service been since it debuted a few months ago? The BR is an excellent concept and has been broadly well received. What we do is place an image pixel on our advertisers’ landing page and upload the logo of the publisher who is redirecting to us. If the click comes from that publisher, then we insert the pub’s logo in the header of the buyer’s landing page, thus reducing bounce rate pretty massively (as much as up to 50 percent in many cases). Problems we faced and continue to face are knowing exactly where or which website sent the original click or redirect as so many sites are redirecting from part of their own network of sites. Additionally we are used by almost every broker, network, media buyer as a backfill solution to their purchases, which means again this is difficult. We have overcome this by testing a solution that uses the referring websites logo where available, which has enabled us to identify even more origins of the traffic. Can you hint about any new products or services on the horizon? We have a great R&D team whom I actually sat with yesterday to discuss the next round of innovation. We are always working on new ad formats since being first to market with both mobile pops and mobile IM ads and we have another four planned which are being tested at the moment but can’t say much more that that right now as some will work well and others not so well. You launched your gay mobile ad network more than a year ago. How successful has that been, and what have you learned? It’s been a slow burner for sure, but it is profitable for us, our advertisers and publishers, and continues to grow every day albeit slower than our straight busines. Some factors: 1. Education of our 1,500 advertisers, in 60 geos, to produce gay versions of their landing pages is a slow enough process. To give you an idea, it takes anywhere between three to six months to roll out a new ad format or size, 100 percent, to our global network. So imagine getting all those buyers to change their landers and get new content, etc. 2. Lack of quality inventory that is mobile optimized. The above buyers are reluctant to create a gay lander for a very low volume of clicks, as it’s barely worth the effort. We have a very high-profile recruit from the industry starting with us in London who is making the move from across the pond to assist us in really motoring forwards. We will roll out our existing campaigns to redirects and pop-unders which will enable us to work with non-mobile-optimized gay publishers who can redirect or use pops to monetize their mobile inventory. We also have beefed up our general traffic acquisition team who now cover each major territory (North America, Latin America, EU and SE Asia) to ensure we can deliver the demand our buyers will create. What are you most optimistic about for your own company and also for the industry in general? Anyone who has met any of the Reporo team in the last two years knows we have only had a very limited interest in tablets. For us this will change before Xmas and in a big way. Everyone knows how much this space has grown recently, especially with the smaller screen tablets on the market. We are perfectly positioned to educate buyers and acquire volume. As a company, we love stretching across the globe and have offices opening in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Singapore and Bangkok all before Xmas, which is pretty exciting as that will take our manned office numbers into double figures.