Nimbus Case Study: Imgur
“The continued efforts on this single interstitial unit, which went from basically not being able to monetize to a 20% incremental increase in our overall revenue, was an immediate plus. It made sense to expand Nimbus to our other existing ad placements.” — Brad, Director of Programmatic, Imgur
Imgur is an image community that creates, consumes and shares tomorrow's viral images, today. Millions of images are uploaded each day to Imgur, where they are distilled by the Imgurian community into a stream of the Internet's best images and viewed billions of times.
Challenge
Imgur had trouble finding programmatic ad solutions that would generate substantial revenue for them without breaking the user-friendly design of their app. On top of that, their small team of five wasn’t able to efficiently optimize their ad stack with partners who lacked transparency.
“Our primary focus was finding a good solution to replace MoPub’s interstitial. The problem with the existing solutions was that you could only exit out of it rather than dismissing when the user swipes. This didn’t really work with the way users use our app.”
— Brad, Director of Programmatic
Because of the lack of flexibility in directing where and how the available ads displayed, Imgur “didn’t really have a real way of targeting them without interrupting that flow.”
Solution
Nimbus collaborated with Imgur to design and implement a brand new ad type specifically for their app. As a new unit they couldn’t get from anyone else, Nimbus helped craft a plan for an initial test that would generate all incremental revenue for them.
“It was also the new open RTB set-up, server-to-server. Nimbus was one of the few video ad solutions that was focused on mobile apps and allowed us to create ad units that served our purposes.”
— Brad, Director of Programmatic
Results
Imgur saw 20% increased revenue with more transparency into their monetization than ever before. Whereas previously it required a lot of time and resources to evaluate demand partners and implement individual SDKs (only to have some be marginally incremental), now Imgur was able to unlock additional revenue streams with the 50+ partners in the Nimbus demand suite — all with 100% transparent reporting.
“We look at all of these individual demand partners coming in via Nimbus and a single SDK, they cumulatively add up to a pretty solid demand partner and can compete with the larger exchanges.”
— Brad, Director of Programmatic
On top of that, Imgur found in Nimbus the latest best-in-class practices, and tech that was impressively fast and easy to work with and maintain for a publisher. This meant, among other things, Imgur was opening up a new pool of video ads that was previously untapped.
When asked if they would recommend similar publishers try Nimbus, Imgur says they “would absolutely advise them to.”
“Nimbus is the most nimble; you're on top of everything. The number one reason I think this partnership works so well is the level of communication between the two teams. It’s not even close. It’s not even comparable.”
— Brad, Director of Programmatic
We’re happy to help Imgur get back in control of their own mobile advertising and are excited to help with their continued success and grow together.