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Aug 14, 2017If you’re an ad network looking for the right CDN, you know there’s a lot to consider when picking the distribution method for serving millions of ads to audiences around the world quickly and reliably. Chartboost uses StackPath to support their global ad marketplace. The global delivery infrastructure that StackPath provides helps to ensure Chartboost’s high-volume, high-revenue generating marketplace remains a leader in mobile games ad distribution.
Chartboost is a global ad platform to monetize mobile games and acquire high quality users across the world. They are currently the largest mobile games focused network with over 300,000 mobile games and over a billion players a month. With offices in San Francisco and Amsterdam, Chartboost continues to grow in supporting game developers and publishers across the world. To support the growth in video across the industry and their own network, Chartboost needs to ensure the delivery of their network’s video ads are efficient, consistent, and complete with every single impression served. The performance of their content delivery remains critical to the success of their customers around the world, and the players’ gaming experience. At StackPath, we work to fully understand the needs of our customers, and that often means understanding the needs of our customer’s customers. The work we do for Chartboost goes hand in hand with the work Chartboost does for their customers, like High Score Hero (maker of Hovercraft), and 1Button (maker of Mr Jump).
As game developers, High Score Hero and 1Button want to focus all their efforts on making awesome games. So they rely on Chartboost to help their games generate revenue. Chartboost, in turn, relies on StackPath to consistently and reliably deliver millions of video ads to millions of daily active users. If you’re delivering interstitial ads in the world of gaming (or anywhere for that matter), the right CDN is important to your bottom line. Done correctly, it can lead to success stories like Mr Jump, which has generated more than $20,000 in a single day with Chartboost. We understand the level of support both Chartboost and their customers require to get those ads delivered.
Timing is key. Interstitial ads need to be locked, loaded, and ready to play at the exact moment the game’s developers have determined for them to appear if a successful user interaction is to be achieved. The importance of timing and consistency in delivery cannot be overstated. Game developers like High Score Hero and 1Button develop their games for placement of interstitials at points in the game when a player is expecting a pause. A natural break in the action is what developers are looking for when deciding where to place these ads, which is why interstitials are often found between levels or when switching activities in a game.
The philosophy is if the user isn’t in a hurry, they’re more likely to consider what the ad has to say and less likely to feel interrupted. We make sure the ad is optimized for the user’s device, displaying fully and properly at the pre-determined, natural break. Because interstitials tend to be large files, they can take a little extra time to load. So the files are requested asynchronously — before they are needed — and this request time can start as early as the game developer determines to make sure the ad is done loading by the time it is needed. The underlying rule is that the ad waits for the user; the user does not wait for the ad. Doing what we do efficiently, consistently, and completely each time an ad is requested means that Chartboost and game developers focus on driving ad performance and maximizing ad revenue.
StackPath knows the needs of game developers and publishers, which aligns their knowledge with our needs very well. StackPath gives us advanced analytics, control with an easily accessible API and console, and a great team that works closely with us to make sure our content is always performing its best.
Deepak Thakral, VP of Product and Engineering
Our solutions and systems engineers here are dedicated to adapting our network to meet the specific needs of any customer in just about any industry we work with. For Chartboost, it’s great that we have extensive experience with game companies. We offer GDN (Game Delivery Network), a service specifically geared toward the delivery of online game content because we learned from doing business with a number of gaming companies which optimizations helped them the most. GDN is massive, lightning-fast, and incorporates multiple layers of technology to optimize downloads, patches, and updates.
This technology has been a significant part of the infrastructure behind Valve’s Steam platform since 2011. The global reach of our network and massive scalability made GDN an ideal solution for Valve to support the game delivery needs for Steam as well as hundreds of other PC, mobile, and browser-based game companies. We are dedicated to optimizing each of our customer’s implementation on our CDN, whether they are delivering video, ads, game downloads, or entire websites and apps.
