How to monetize your cross-platform application with the Qt Digital Advertising platform

Welcome to the third installment of our blog series on digital advertising on embedded and mobile platforms with Qt. In this part, we’re looking into the main challenges associated with cross-platform digital advertising and how Qt can make them a thing of the past for you. If you would like to first catch up with why you should monetize your device or want to brush up on the method and mechanics of digital advertising, please read the prior parts:

Cross-platform challenges for digital advertising

If an application is free to download, how does the app developer make any money? Answer- Through leveraging digital advertising. One of the most obvious ways to multiply revenue is to make the app available on as many platforms as possible.

And here lies the challenge.

On the one hand, creating the same app for the different platforms can take a lot of time and effort for smartphones alone. If add embedded devices to the mix, more form factors and chip architectures, development and maintenance costs can increase exponentially.

Cross-platform digital advertising contributes its own sets of challenges, such as the disconnect between the available technologies to deliver digital ads, which further increase the burden of managing, maintaining, and deploying different ads across different platforms. This burden is even more pronounced on embedded devices, where technology for programmatic advertising is sparse.

A one-stop-shop for cross-platform digital advertising

There is a need for a consistent development and deployment framework to provide a more scalable way to monetize desktop and mobile applications. The ability to design and deploy digital advertising natively within a single framework is the most scalable and efficient way to deploy ads. 

Qt is a development platform people use when they want to efficiently create native, software with just one code base and one development framework. Very few adjustments are needed to deploy Qt software across the different platforms and maintain a consistent user experience. That part takes addresses the challenges of efficiently developing the multi-platform app in question.

Now, running digital ads in Qt applications has been possible for a while. It was typically done via integrating third-party SDKs, which came with its own set of challenges:

  • The time and cost to implement for the first release are rather excessive
  • Software updates require an update to the advertising solution to ensure compatibility
  • Changes in the SDK version can break the monetization flow

The mobile industry has gone leaps and bounds to address such issues and tightly defined standards for media such as banner shapes, interstitial and reward videos, etc., to make ads as easy to implement as possible.

We wanted to enable Qt users to deploy digital advertising in the same manner.

That is why we came up with an ad solution that is native to the Qt development framework, simplifies the setup, deployment, and ad management.

And, as a true lifesaver, we wanted to grant our users easy access to programmatic advertising on IoT devices.

The Qt Digital Advertising offering aims to help both our open-source community and commercial Qt customers to quickly and easily develop, prototype, and launch monetization solutions on their cross-platform use cases. These new revenue streams can be used to both increase profit margins and mitigate development and maintenance investments.

Our native, easy-to-use, plug-and-play offering, makes it easy for designers and developers to reserve space for digital advertisements on their screens and adapt to their look and feel to the rest of the application. See here how this is done.

Once the Ad placeholders are positioned in the UI, two monetization options, programmatic or direct ad serving, become available. Via programmatic technology, Qt users can define their requirements to media buyers in the networks, and automatically have their digital ads approved and delivered to the screens of IoT devices, smartphones, or desktops by the media owner.

Through a direct Ad serving option, Qt users can negotiate advertising deals directly with their personal network of brand partners and advertisers. Once an agreement is reached between the media owner and their advertiser or brand partner, the ads that will be displayed are simply uploaded to the platform and scheduled and prioritized as to when and how often they will be displayed on the screen.

Here is a short video that shows how easy it is to integrate IAB-compliant cross-platform digital ads:

 

If you would like to more in detail how to monetize your cross-platform application with Qt Digital Advertising, we highly recommend our webinar on the topic. Watch it here.

If you are interested in monetizing your mobile and desktop applications and/or your IoT devices built with Qt quickly, efficiently, and natively, try the Qt Digital Advertising Solution free today!


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