Mobile App Industry Leaders Partner to Launch First-Ever Open API Standard for User Acquisition Marketing Campaigns

SAN FRANCISCO, March 29, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- Leading user analytics innovator Kontagent today announced the launch of the Mobile Acquisition Transparency Alliance (MATA), creator of the mobile industry's first-ever open API designed to bring transparency and efficiency to data collection, processing and reporting for mobile user acquisition campaigns. The Alliance is comprised of a wide group of industry leaders, including many top developers, monetization platform PlayHaven, demand side platform MdotM, direct deals marketplace provider Chartboost, and leading ad networks.

Mobile developers and ad providers are rallying around the MATA open API because of the painful processes they currently endure to consolidate the campaign performance metrics they need to make better business decisions. MATA streamlines the extremely fragmented and sometimes painful data collection and analysis processes now in place by defining and implementing a platform-agnostic, industry-wide Open API standard for the formatting, processing and timely reporting of mobile app user acquisition metrics.

With recent news that Apple is prohibiting UDIDs, the need for such a standard reporting mechanism is even more critical to the ongoing innovation, growth and accountability of the entire ecosystem. The MATA Open API is agnostic to any mobile device unique identifier used by developers and ad providers and is designed to support any install detection standards the industry ultimately settles on. MATA members are also involved in the on-going efforts to find a viable solution that resolves the ongoing privacy concerns associated with UDIDs. 

"Traffic attribution and measuring the ROI of users by origin is one of the biggest pain points for anyone with a mobile app component to their business," said Andy Yang, CEO of PlayHaven, a leading mobile monetization platform. "We believe in absolute transparency and are very excited to take the industry a step forward with MATA."

"Not having easy and predictable access to important acquisition metrics across all of our mobile marketing channels is a serious problem for us, and I imagine any mobile app developer," said Mike Sego, CEO of Gaia Online, a large mobile app developer. "This Alliance will enable us to operate our business with greater clarity and vision into ROI, and to be much more intelligent about where we decide to invest our money in acquiring new customers."

"Unifying the APIs that everyone uses right now to report conversion is great for mobile developers, and by joining this initiative Chartboost is enabling them to use the same technology for Direct Deals," said Maria Alegre, CEO of Chartboost, the Direct Deals marketplace that enables game developers to buy and sell advertising directly from each other.

"We believe that MATA is a step in the right direction for the industry and will make it easier for our clients to continue running scalable and profitable, performance-based campaigns. MdotM's API offering together with MATA represents a strong value proposition to our clients," said Sourabh Niyogi, CEO of MdotM, a leading mobile Demand Side Platform. "MdotM is excited to be a part of this initiative."

Built with mutual collaboration amongst developers, marketers, networks, agencies, direct deals marketplace, and others the open MATA standard also ensures the needs of all key stakeholders are met.

"The ingestion of user acquisition data is an enormous pain point for the industry and it's growing even more problematic by the day as the mobile industry explodes," said Josh Williams, President and Chief Science Officer at Kontagent. "MATA solves this problem and provides high-quality, reliable data to the studios, while offloading the data feed responsibility from the ad networks, exchanges and other providers onto a robust, scalable Open API designed and maintained by MATA Key Advisory Members."

"The industry has been clamoring for a solution like this for years, and we and MATA partners are now solving this growing problem before it gets worse," Williams said. "Analytics is what we do. We don't sell apps and we don't sell ads, so our motivation is purely to serve as a catalyst to help everyone in the industry eliminate headaches, stop wasting time and start growing business."

For more information about MATA and how to become part of the alliance for better data standards, visit http://www.openmata.org.

About Kontagent
Kontagent is the leading enterprise user analytics platform for application developers, marketers and product managers across the social and mobile Web. Kontagent tracks more than 1,000 social and mobile applications, over 150 million monthly active users, and in excess of 15,000 messages every second. Our proprietary platform, kSuite, has been built from the ground up to harness deep data pattern visualization and analysis that provide our customers with valuable, actionable insights. Armed with this data, and combined with Kontagent's team of data scientists, our customers have the power to better measure and optimize their customer economics and build a more profitable enterprise. Kontagent is funded by ALTOS Ventures, Maverick Capital and Battery, with additional funding from Facebook and other well-known angel investors. Founded in 2007, the company is headquartered in the SOMA district of San Francisco with additional offices in Toronto and London. For more information, go to www.kontagent.com.

About PlayHaven: 
PlayHaven is a real-time mobile game marketing platform with a reach of 36 million unique users driving 180 million monthly game sessions. PlayHaven's mission is to bring the speed and flexibility of the web into mobile games to help developers maximize the revenue potential of their titles. Based in San Francisco, CA, PlayHaven launched in May of 2010 and has helped more than 750 games in the App Store. For more information, visit: www.playhaven.com

About Chartboost:                         
Started by early Tapulous employees, Chartboost offers a way for mobile games to make more money by selling their traffic directly to advertisers instead of paying a 50-percent fee to an ad network. The San Francisco-based company recently closed $2 million Series A funding, announced one billion impressions served, and expanded to Asia and Europe. Chartboost is available for both iOS and Android. For more information, visit: http://chartboost.com.

About MdotM:
MdotM is a performance-based mobile Demand Side Platform reaching more than 135mm unique users across iOS and Android.  The MdotM mobile Demand Side Platform allows advertisers and agencies to efficiently reach their target audience in real-time by gaining access to billions of monthly mobile ad requests. For more information, go to http://mdotm.com.

SOURCE Kontagent