In its ongoing quest to be more than the “King of SMS,” 4INFO has reached a major milestone.
In a recent Nielsen report for US mobile display advertising, 4INFO tallied more than 63 million uniques for the month of September, or roughly 75% of the market. That put them in second place, ahead of Microsoft’s Extended Ad Network, Quattro, AdMob and Jumptap. Millennial was number one with 72 million uniques.
With a reach of 63 million per month, 4INFO’s mobile display business has now eclipsed the company’s original bread and butter: SMS advertising. Its SMS ad network touches roughly 45 million per month.
Founded in 2005, the mobile advertising company has dominated the SMS ad space, with roughly 3,000 publishers on its msgHaven platform. This publishing platform, which allows clients to manage the content and delivery of their SMS campaign, delivers roughly 400 million text messages per month.
And yet for all the success with SMS, 4INFO’s CEO, Zaw Thet has been trying to reshape the company as a one-stop shop for all of mobile advertising.
Now, no one would call 4INFO the king of mobile just yet, but Thet has made significant strides in 2010, picking up Butter in June (a startup that creates customized mobile solutions), fleshing out AdHaven, its mobile ad management platform, and leveraging its SMS relationships. Explaining the recent jump in display advertising uniques, Thet says the company has made progress by “moving up the stack from the existing SMS relationships we have with the top publishers and media companies in the US and signing new platform deals.”
This Tuesday, the company is also rolling out a new version of AdHaven, which will provide a more comprehensive suite of mobile advertising tools. Beyond display and SMS ad management, the platform will feature full support for in-app rich media, video and a software development kit.
