Opera ASA, the parent company of Opera Mediaworks, reported its financial earnings today. The earnings numbers showed that Opera Mediaworks, its fully-owned mobile advertising subsidiary, continued to be the strongest contributor of revenue, accounting for 72% of Opera’s overall revenue, and that it is the largest growth area of the business.
Total revenues for Opera Mediaworks in Q1 2016 were reported in at $117.2M – which is a growth of 41% over the same time last year. This growth rate compares favorably to other large, at-scale and profitable mobile advertising players in the industry, and 2nd only to Facebook for growth in Q1. Facebook is no. 1 followed by Opera Mediaworks, then trailed by Google and Twitter. (This comparison is based on revenues and growth percentages that the above-mentioned companies reported in their respective Q1 2016 earnings.)
In addition, Opera Mediaworks’ revenues from mobile video advertising in the quarter were larger than pure play video companies Tremor and YuMe combined.
Opera Mediaworks’ mobile ad platform added 430 million users to its platform in the past year, and it now reaches 1.43 billion consumers globally. That’s a 43% year-over-year growth rate in platform reach — most of which is through its proprietary mobile SDK.
Summary of the Q1 financial earnings:
$117.2M in revenue in Q1 2016, over 41% YOY growth
Opera ASA (parent company) reported overall revenues of $163.5M
Opera Mediaworks platform reach grew 43% YOY to 1.43 billion consumers globally
Mobile video continued to make the largest contribution, comprising 68% of Opera Mediaworks’ revenues
Top 3 growth drivers: Brand, performance and programmatic advertising
The key drivers for the higher-than-expected revenue growth in Q1 were Opera Mediaworks’ brand and performance advertising businesses, as well as growth in programmatic sales.
Brand advertising
Within the brand advertising business, overall deal sizes with brand advertisers continued to increase as the company saw larger budgets from key customers, showing a clear shift in spend toward mobile.
Brands continued to focus on mobile-first advertising creative that not only tells a story and evokes emotion, but also drives an outcome through a call to action. Brands are combining branding with the unique properties of mobile devices to allow for deeper interaction and specific calls-to-action to drive outcomes like downloading a coupon, tapping to purchase, swiping through a photo gallery or watching longer form video. Some examples of Q1 campaigns can be seen here.
As brands become more attribution minded, the Brand and Performance advertising businesses are converging.
Performance advertising
Performance advertising grew more than 57% year-over-year as the company saw continued demand for app installs and performance advertising products on a global scale. Each region around the world achieved growth in Performance advertising sales.
Programmatic sales
As the industry moves toward the adoption of programmatic advertising, that trend was also seen within the Opera Mediaworks platform, as programmatic sales grew 143% from the same quarter last year. Many customers shifted their traditional IO-based business to programmatic for increased efficiencies.
Mobile video share leaps 10 percentage points
Continuing the trend from previous quarters, Opera Mediaworks’ revenue shift towards video continued into Q1 2016. This past quarter, $79.7 million (or 68%) of the company’s revenues came from mobile video advertising. At the same time last year, that share was 58%.
Publishers coming on board in droves
In a world of 3 million+ apps globally, quality apps with high reach and engagement is more important than quantity. As a result, our focus on the Top 1000 apps is paying off and Opera Mediaworks has once again held its position as having one of the highest SDK footprints in mobile within the Top 1000 apps across iOS and Android. In Q1, Opera Mediaworks continued to add high-quality, mobile-first apps worldwide to its platform. The number of publishers on track to earn over a million dollars a year from advertising via the platform more than doubled in Q1 2016 versus the same time last year.
Growth around the globe continued at a solid pace with a significant number of major customer wins in all key regions (i.e., EMEA, APAC, LatAm), plus a handful of creative awards for campaigns created by Opera House, the company’s global in-house creative studio.
“In a highly competitive and rapidly changing ecosystem, Opera Mediaworks has managed to grow faster than most of its competitors. We attribute this success to our focus on working with the next generation of mobile-first apps we call ‘today’s premium’ and on delivering the technology that powers high quality consumer ad experiences resulting in real outcomes for our clients,” said CEO Will Kassoy.
“We’ve been playing to our strengths, such as our Instant-Play™ video offering, Performance advertising, our global brand sales organization, our programmatic offering, and our highly-valuable SDK footprint, the second only to Google among the top 1000 apps1,” he added.