Interview with commercial director of the portal zaycev.net / Appodeal Blog

In the welcome article of our blog on Habré, the project founder, Pavel Golubev, already briefly told the community what Appodeal is , why it was created and how, in general terms, it works. But you can talk about yourself for a long time and anything, much more valuable is the opinion of the client. For this reason, we offer you to read an interview with Anton Khaminsky, commercial director of the portal zaycev.net . In March of this year, zaycev.net became an Appodeal client. Anton answered a number of questions and shared his impressions of working with the service.

The interview is presented in the format Q: questions of the main interviewer, Qr: questions of the editor of the blog on Habré, A: answers of Anton Khaminsky.

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Greetings .

Q: Anton, as I understand it, today we’ll talk more about Appodeal than about you. But as a little background information: there is huge traffic on your applications through Appodeal, right?
A: Yes, we have a large application. I’ll explain a little why we’ll talk specifically about Appodeal. I do not want to focus on us, because the interview will be published on the guys’s blog. For this reason, it’s not worth advertising ourselves at their expense, I’ll just leave a “review” about working with them. I think it will be right.

Q: Good. Let's talk about Appodeal. Have you had problems using other ad networks, monetization, which ones?
A:I can tell about this. If we talk about working with networks, then the main problems we encountered are low fillrate, a small number of advertising campaigns in Russia. Since the mobile advertising market in the Russian-speaking segment is at the development stage and for many is completely incomprehensible, there are still no common canons, it is quite difficult to communicate with each network, since there are a lot of them, networks. Another problem is the difficulty in studying the systems of each network. They are all very different and tailored to their vision, they have their own views on the market. If we single out the main, in my opinion, problems, then this is, first of all, communication with advertising networks and, therefore, large amounts of work in this area. Everyone needs to get in touch. Someone answers for a long time, someone is not too imprisoned for Russia, and so on.

Q: What networks did you work with the most? Pinned any hopes on them, how much time did you spend?
A: We have worked with so many networks in an attempt to find the best one for us. In fact, work was carried out with all the top 40.

Q: How did you find out about Appodeal? When you became their clients, they were at a fairly early stage.
A: I learned about Appodeal from an article on Habré . I searched for information about mobile advertising for a very long time and stumbled upon Paul's publication. So I found out that there is a similar tool. I can say that I was very pleased.

Q: Did Appodeal somehow help with the connection? They are now trying to do this for the first customers.
A:Yes they helped. In terms of the Appodeal service, we are more than happy. In general, I only have positive reviews about the company, because the guys work great. We have no complaints against them. We have been cooperating for several months and everything is very cool.

Q: Now do you use them only for advertising in an Android application?
A: Yes, exactly.

Q: What were the first results? When did the “positive” begin, that is, when did you realize that the service was working? What is this “positive" expressed?
A: The results appeared quickly enough, already in the first week. We achieved good performance by the third week. In the mobile market, 1-2 days are not enough for the application advertising to swing. I think a week is a normal time.

Q:How much has revenue increased compared to past best practices? In comparison with the maximum indicators before, did incomes increase?
A: Yes, I can confidently say that revenues have grown. In addition, Appodeal took off a serious piece of the load from me. First of all, in terms of negotiations and cooperation with various companies. For me, the problems and time costs that arise when communicating with mobile networks have ceased to exist.

Q: What can you say about fillrate?
A: Everything is ok, here it is approaching 100%.

Q: It all sounds a bit fabulous ( laughs)) That is, there was a huge amount of communication with advertising networks, but then a small company appeared that took over all this. Is this real?
A: Yes. I agree that it sounds a bit fabulous ( laughs ). When I read the first time about Appodeal on Habré, I immediately wrote to the guys. I found out that they work from the USA. One of the first things I asked was: “Guys, is it all that you are telling? Because it sounds incredibly cool. " Talked with their founder, Pavel, he then told me everything. And you know, I believed in them, thought what should work, even if it sounds like a fairy tale.

Q: What can the guys improve in terms of service? They just started to work and they have a long way ahead.
A:There is always where to strive. I think that it is necessary to work in each direction, that is, to select fairly narrow areas and bring the work in them to the ideal. Make them optimally cost-effective, profitable and efficient. And then develop the rest. Specifically: I would like for new advertising formats to appear. We now have three formats, but we could add native advertising. I don’t know how possible this is based on their model, but if this is implemented, it will be cool. In terms of service, in terms of customer relationship and communication, Appodeal is already up to par. If you compare them with companies that I had to deal with before, I can put them in the top five.

Q: Is this taking into account all possible topics? Or only in terms of mobile advertising?
A:Compared with absolutely any company. I like their attitude to work, and just great guys.

Q: Are there any problems that can be emphasized? You talked about the advantage of Appodeal in terms of communication with many networks, revenue growth.
A: This is generally good service. I can at any time ask any question regarding mobile advertising. They will advise you in detail and help you understand what and how it works. The company is very open and you can talk about it from different angles. Appodeal position themselves as follows: “We don’t take money from you, but we take from advertisers”, they get a percentage of the volume of traffic (Editor's Note: Appodeal does not actually take a percentage of ad network traffic. If Appodeal can show a more expensive banner than chartboost, applovin, admob or any other network, then it shows and takes its commission. If it cannot, then it shows one of the above networks and does not charge a commission ).

Q: Is there anything else they are good at?
A: Our interview will look custom-made ( laughs ), but I am delighted with working with Appodeal. I have no negative reviews about them, because they have no problems. They take and do what they say.

Q: You were one of the first serious customers who connected to them? Until February, Appodeal was in a closed test.
A:Yes. As far as I know, we are the first of the major customers of the company.

Qr: Please recall the problems at work. Everything does not happen 100% smoothly.
A: As far as I know, there are some questions on iOS, we had a couple of comments on working with Android.

Q: Have you had any problems with integration?
A:Yes, Appodeal had one point that had to be solved in manual mode for some applications. But everything was fixed in early May. I am not a technical specialist and cannot give a full-fledged, competent answer to the question about the pros and cons of integration with Appodeal. But, for example, we had one "joint", which hit about 1% of users. Appodeal offered to indemnify us. This is the first company in my practice to offer this. In general, we did not demand any damages, because everything was decided promptly, within two days.

Qr:It turns out the following picture: you are a large customer, you came to Appodeal one of the first and you have everything cool. There are questions about the threshold of entry. If you specify, then in terms of procedures for starting work with the service. Will anybody pull a collaboration with Appodeal? There are private developers on Habré who would like to monetize and this is an important issue for them. Won't connection procedures be too complicated for an average developer or a small team? You are large players and you have processed these moments. Your personal opinion.
A:It seems to me that any developers will like to work with Appodeal. At first, I also did not understand all the details and did not understand some points. The Appodeal guys made it all clear and telling. I got the impression that they are interested in working with any volumes and any customers. The team wants to make a good product and work with it. In my opinion, small developers will succeed and there will be no connection problems. Appodeal is ready to work with everyone.

Qr: Summarizing, "User-friendly"?
A: Yes, everything is very loyal.

Q: Thank you. That is probably all.
A: Good. I was glad to talk. All the best.
Q: All the best.

// The article talked about monetizing this application.