September has been a huge month at Chomp! The Chomp team has been working really hard to give you an even greater search experience. Verizon and Chomp announced that the Chomp search engine will ship with Android phones this fall. Now we’re making two more announcements. We are releasing our new ad product, Chomp Search Ads. This is a significant milestone in the history of not just Chomp but the entire mobile ecosystem. We are also launching a completely redesigned version of Chomp for the iPhone, which makes it even faster and easier for you to find the apps you want and discover new ones.
Chomp Search Ads is the first advertising product to connect app advertisers to consumers searching for apps. It will deliver the highest quality users to developers while ensuring an even better search experience for users. Chomp Search Ads, allows advertisers to capitalize on billions of app downloads for app discovery. According to Gartner Group, $893 million was spent on app advertising in 2010. With over 200 million iOS and Android users looking for apps each month, developers are spending 20-30% of total app revenue they generate on trying to acquire new users through various advertising and marketing initiatives. Total app revenue is expected to be $50 billion by 2014, and as a result, is forecasting a $15-20 billion spend on app advertising.[1]
Developers, for the first time, can bid on keywords or phrases, which will deliver their ads when users search on those terms within Chomp. Chomp Search Ads matches app ads to the most relevant potential customer, resulting in quality ad matching for both the advertiser and the consumer. Our product will be opening up to a limited amount of advertisers during this first stage of private beta. Ads will be shown for apps based on a number of factors, such as bid price, as well as relevancy to the search term. Our users will always receive the most relevant search results, irrespective of advertising buys. Campaign reporting to advertisers will allow the developer to measure the performance of Chomp Search Ads.
Kevin Rose, Chomp advisor and Founder of app development company Milk, comments on Chomp Search Ads “Chomp’s ability to give Milk keyword ad delivery as a result of relevant user search is as ground-breaking as when Google first offered keyword advertising for the web.” Prior to Chomp Search Ads, advertisers could only buy app display or performance advertising, however under these models, ad placement is disconnected from the user’s desire to find an app. Our goal is to make advertising accessible for the bulk of developers. It will have a huge impact for developers that don’t have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on advertising, being able to purchase a product that specifically targets the right customers. You can sign up for the private beta at ads.chomp.com or by clicking the link at the bottom of the chomp.com home page.
Today we are also launching a new version of Chomp for the iPhone, which has a great new design, a lot of new features and it makes it even faster and easier for you to find the apps you want. Over the last year, we’ve been listening to you, our users and have conducted multiple focus groups and solicited input from a lot of mobile users. Based on your input and our own learning we have decided to take another leap forward making discovering apps an even easier and fun experience. The completely redesigned home screen features a prominent search box that automatically begins displaying search suggestions as soon as you start typing. The home screen also displays the top ten suggested search terms as determined by what is actively trending, while displaying preview icons of the top apps. Additionally, five user-recommended topic tiles are displayed on the home screen which include Free apps of the day, Top 100, New apps, On sale and Surprise me. We are really excited to share our new iPhone app with you! It is available for download at Chomp.com and iTunes.
Ben Keighran
CEO & Co-Founder
Screen shots of Chomp Search Ads
Screen shots of the new iPhone app
[1] Statistics as reported by TechCrunch