APAC leading globally for in-app ad growth

Asia-Pacific is the fastest growing region in the world for in-app advertising, according to PubMatic’s latest Quarterly Mobile Index.

Comprising data from analysing more than 13 trillion monthly global advertiser bids through its platform, PubMatic found that for the first time, APAC overtook Europe, Middle East and Africa to become the second-largest region globally for in-app impressions, with North America still at the top.

The industry’s ongoing battle to combat in-app ad fraud has seen the rise of private market places, the report found, although open market real-time bidding did rebound from Q2 2018.

There also remains plenty of work in adoption of the IAB’s app-ads.txt standard, with only around 12% of the top 1,000 apps on iOS or Android having adopted the format.

In good news for Apple, the report found that iOS is driving this in-app growth, with the operating system now accounting for more than half of worldwide mobile ad impressions in Q2 2019. iOS is even seeing significant growth in APAC, where Android dominates, rising to a 29% share from 16% the year before.

A key reason for this, PubMatic found, is the continued growth of video in-app ads, which increased 127% in iOS alone over the last year. Particular growth was seen in-app in news, with in-app video rising 391% year-on-year. PubMatic attributes this in particular to the start of the US presidential primaries, and expects further growth as the political season continues.