You might still think of Opera as a browser company. However a number of strategic mobile advertising acquisitions over the past few years have transformed the company into a global advertising business that also happens to make a browser.
Opera says it works with “90 percent of the Ad Age Top 100” and reaches a billion mobile uniques monthly. It also claims that “17 percent of the global [mobile] advertising spend [is] driven by Opera Mediaworks.” Challenging a similar claim by InMobi, Opera says it’s the largest independent mobile advertising company globally.
The company exceeded $100 million in quarterly ad revenue in Q4. Following the acquisition of video platform AdColony a year ago, Opera now says that mobile video advertising is responsible for more than half its revenue growth and more than half of revenue for publishers that it works with.
Indeed, video is the fastest growing mobile ad format overall, driving much more revenue than its overall impression share.
Opera said the following in its Q1 2015 mobile advertising report:
In the past year, the share of impressions from video ad formats has increased over 5X, from 2.5% of all impressions in Q1 2014 to now just over 12.8% of impressions. Meanwhile, revenue from video has grown to become over 55% of revenue delivered to publishers.
Movie and TV advertisers are heavily adopting mobile video. But video advertising is also growing broadly across brand and industry verticals, including food and drink, automotive and financial/insurance.
As part of the Q1 mobile advertising report Opera said that Android has for the first time passed iOS in mobile revenue (on its network). This is primarily being driven by markets outside of the US and Europe.
However when it comes to video and rich media iOS still outperformed Android in terms of both impressions and revenue. Opera added, “Apple device users also have a significantly higher completion rate than Android users.”
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