As you guys might remember, last fall I liveblogged Under The Radar: Mobility. One of the companies I praised was Mojiva, which hoped to beat Google and other ad platforms by offering a self-serve ad purchasing service, which is differentiated by the fact that ads will be served on mobile Web sites according to keyword-based and location-based criteria.
So I was bummed when it seemed that one of the promising ways to monetize mobile looked like it was having problems. Commenters on my original post that mentioned Mojiva recently said that as of last weekend, ad publishers still hadn’t been paid for January revenue. And on the Mobility.mobi forum, a thread that began March 10 was rife with claims that publishers still hadn’t been paid. One user said he/she had always been paid on time by Mojiva until the start of 2009. All this gave rise to speculation that the company might not be doing so well.
When I asked the company for comment, I received this statement by Mojiva co-founder and CTO Krish Arvapally:
“Publishers are the lifeblood of our business and we are proud of the relationships we have forged with our publishing partners. The overwhelming majority of Mojiva publishers are extremely happy with our service and payment schedule, both of which we take great pride in being the best in industry. Mojiva is also well-financed and recently completed a capital raise from Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments.
“Mojiva’s policy is to pay publishers within 30 days after the end of each calendar month if their balance is more than $100. If an account has a balance of less than $100, then it is rolled over to the next payment schedule until the account balance is greater than $100. We pay all legitimate publishers within these service terms. At the same time, Mojiva proactively guards its advertiser base against potential publisher fraud by not responding to requests from individuals whose traffic patterns clearly suggest illegitimate click activity.
“If any mobile publisher feels our fraud algorithms are too strict, we have, in the past, asked them for their own logs which usually verify our alert system. Should there be any occasion in which legitimate payment is then owed, Mojiva will work with that publisher to send payment accordingly.”
From what Mojiva says, those who aren’t getting paid either have revenue of less than $100 or are illegitimate marketers, i.e. spammers. If true, then kudos to the company. If not, I’d like to hear about it–but be sure to use your real names and companies, folks!
