Chartboost Launches Helium, the First Open-Source In-App Programmatic Bidding Solution

By STS News Desk On Nov 21, 2019

Chartboost Launches Helium, the First Open-Source In-App Programmatic Bidding Solution

Chartboost Is Partnering with Strong Advertising Platforms to Drive More Revenue for Mobile App Developers

Chartboost, the leading mobile app monetization and programmatic advertising platform, is announcing the launch of Helium. Helium’s SDK allows mobile app developers to increase their ad revenues by conducting an unbiased first-price unified auction for every impression opportunity. Helium’s unified auction receives real-time bids from Facebook Audience Network, Tapjoy, AdColony as well as the Chartboost Exchange, which includes 20+ programmatic demand partners such as Liftoff, Xandr, Rubicon Project, OpenX, Criteo, Moloco and more. Through these integrations, Helium instantly provides developers with access to millions of premium advertising campaigns globally, increasing their yield and fill rate.

Traditional ad monetization stacks require resource-intensive and manual optimizations that are based on predicted and historical eCPMs. Generally speaking, most of the existing technologies do not support running a true auction for every impression. Advertisers who are mediated into lower waterfall positions for monetization are not able to compete for all impressions, despite the fact that there may be demand with higher bids than what mediation layers can predict. Helium’s in-app unified auction allows developers to increase competition for their impressions by unlocking a diverse set of buyers who bid real-time CPMs.

‘Helium’s technical integration is very straightforward and we’ve seen a 10% increase in ARPDAU only after one month of testing,’ says Alexander Kuzub, CTO of Dynamic Games. “While performance is key to us, another equally important benefit of Helium is that we’ve been able to save resources, 4-6 hours per week, from manually updating the waterfall, freeing up time for our team to build a great ad experience for our users instead.”

An important characteristic of Helium is that it has an open-source vision: “As Chartboost we strongly believe in open source technologies. We are starting an open source auction server, but in the future, we’d like for the entire Helium’s platform to be in the hands of the developer community,” says Sean Fannan, co-founder and CTO of Chartboost.

Transparency has always been a challenge across ad mediation technology. Data is usually aggregated, and app developers do not have the visibility into key indicators that can help determine the true market value of their inventory. The Helium dashboard gives app developers visibility to various auction metrics throughout the transaction funnel. Chartboost embraces transparency and has built Helium on the premise of bringing more clarity and efficiency to the monetization stack, which is currently lacking in the marketplace.

“Developers are demanding to have full access to their data, and Helium offers them the most granular and transparent analytics. We believe that putting an open, neutral and customizable monetization tech stack in the hands of mobile app developers is a big step forward for our industry,” says Sean Fannan.