Mobile advertising platform, InMobi, is quietly powering the monetisation of social and messaging apps with native ads. Publishers monetising with InMobi have seen up to 5x increase in monetisation.

Social and messaging apps are among the fastest growing categories on app stores. Most apps in this category are extremely specialised – dating, business, anonymous posts, sharing common interests like superheroes or comics.

Enabling these diverse apps with native ads requires a versatile ad platform that places publishers in control of how they would like to render ads. InMobi Native Ads solutions are tailored to different app categories, making it easy for publishers to deliver an intuitive ad experience. Native ads are ads that mimic the form and function of the app in which they are placed.

Since its launch of the world’s first self-serve native ads platform in 2014, InMobi has on-boarded popular social and messaging apps that include Tango, Blackberry Messenger, TextMe, Pinger, Chatous, Skout, MeetMe and Handcent for native monetisation.

“15 of the top 50 social and messaging apps that we work with collectively account for 600 million users. InMobi provides advertisers a unified platform to reach these diverse users across multiple apps,” said Atul Satija, chief revenue officer, InMobi. “These are highly engaged users, as we see one in every three social and messaging users access one or more apps at four different times of the day.”

“Partnering with InMobi for advertising was an easy choice, given the strength and flexibility of the InMobi platform and ability to seamlessly integrate native advertising in the BBM feed” said Matthew Talbot, SVP emerging solutions at Blackberry.

Social and messaging apps have been leading the adoption of mobile native ads. Some 78 percent of all native ads on the InMobi platform are delivered on apps in these categories.

“Reports indicate that that social and messaging apps are expected to rake in $25 billion in revenues by 2017 as they expand and offer services such as payments, taxi booking and app distribution,” said Piyush Shah, chief product officer, InMobi. “Our Native Ads platform enables every app in this category (and in other categories like entertainment, photo, utilities and news) to not only monetise their user base smartly but also provide an engaging and effective discovery experience to their users.”