We are delighted to have thousands of satisfied users on the AdDuplex network. But there’s one particular constituency who always reminded us that we weren’t serving them perfectly. This group is game developers. Particularly developers of more involved and dynamic games. Usually they couldn’t find a reasonable space to put a banner ad during gameplay and showing banner ads only on the menu screen didn’t help them achieve results they could expect considering the popularity of their games.

There’s a widely accepted industry solution for games – interstitial ads – ads occupying most of the screen during transitions between levels, stages of the game, game sessions, etc. It doesn’t interfere with the gameplay or visual design of the screens of the game, but attracts user attention much better than banner ads.

We had to change a lot under covers and in the way you manage your ad units and it took a while. But I’m happy to report that we are ready to start serving interstitials for your games (and apps for that matter).

Windows Phone, cross-promotion only for now

Our initial launch is targeting Windows Phone only (WP7 & WP8 Silverlight, WP 8.1 XAML). We want to make sure that the new architecture is the right one before extending the support to Windows Store apps and games.

At the same time you won’t be able to buy commercial advertising via interstitial ads for a little while. The reason for this is obvious – while developers work on implementing interstitials into their games, there isn’t much inventory to sell. Once we have a meaningful amount of traffic circulating in the interstitials part of the network, we will open this inventory for paid campaigns. Stay tuned for a separate announcement.

Early adopters win

As usual it pays off to be early in every big thing. And interstitials are big – both literally and in the impact they can make in new users for early adopters. The earlier you join, the bigger share of the traffic pie you can get.

And if that in itself is not enough, here are a couple of extra perks:

• one of the first 10 developers to launch a game/app with AdDuplex interstitials will get a Lumia 1520 – big phone for big ads! That’s 1 in 10 chance to win! The same rules as for our earlier “Every phone they make” sweepstakes apply.
• everyone who launches on the interstitials network before the end of February, 2015 will get a permanent 90% exchange ratio (as opposed to the regular 80%). Meaning that you’ll get 10% more traffic than other developers who miss this opportunity.
• you will automatically participate in our biggest sweepstakes to date! (details here)

Great! How do I start?

We have just launched a new version of our Client Area with support for interstitial ads (among other things). Go register if you are not a member yet.

If you are adding the interstitials to an app that is not on AdDuplex yet, just go to “Cross-promote”, click on “New app” button and follow the initial instructions.

After that (or if you want to add interstitials to a game/app already serving AdDuplex banner ads) just go to that app’s details and click the “Ad new ad unit button”

You will be presented with a choice to create either a banner or interstitial ad unit. Click on the “Create interstitial ad” button.

You will need two 1600×900 and 900×1600 images (256kb max) for your landscape and portrait ads. We will scale them down automatically in the future to preserve network traffic on devices with lower resolution screens. There’s no text ad option for interstitials.

Once you’ve added the images save and switch to the “Code” tab where you will find the code and instructions on how to add it into your app:

Once you’ve done this and tested that everything works (with IsTest property set to true) publish your app and we will activate your app/ad the next business day after we start seeing impressions coming from it.

Note: If you are familiar with how AdDuplex implementation worked in the past, you may have noticed that the structure of properties identifying an app/ad unit in the SDK has changed. Do not worry, the SDK is backward compatible and if you just upgrade your older app to a new SDK everything should work. However, we encourage you to update your code to the new way (AppKey, AdUnitId) when you have a chance. There will be a separate blog post about this change in coming days.

Let’s get this started!

I hope you are as excited as I am to get the interstitial (sub)network going and expand the user base of your games without spending an extra cent on user acquisition!

Please, keep in mind that this is the first public release of these features and there will be some bugs and rough edges. If you find something out of ordinary or have any suggestions on how to improve anything, please, do not hesitate to let us know in the comments below or via email at support@adduplex.com