Opera Mediaworks has strong finish to 2015; 2nd largest ad SDK footprint globally
Opera Mediaworks demonstrated its consistent dominance as one of the top platforms in the mobile advertising industry by reporting strong performance in Q4 2015. Last week, parent company Opera ASA announced Q4 2015 financial earnings and Opera Mediaworks, a fully-owned subsidiary, continued to be the strongest contributor of revenue (75% of overall Opera ASA revenues) and growth to the parent company.
Alongside the quarterly earnings, the company also announced that a consortium of Chinese Internet companies has made a public offer to buy all shares of Opera ASA. Here is our blog post with more details on this offer, that is pending shareholder and regulatory approval.
Opera Mediaworks reported over 40% year-over-year increase in Q4 global ad revenue to $145.5 million and over 53% year-over-year increase in revenue on an annual basis.
The company also reported that it now has the second-largest advertising SDK footprint in mobile after Google, as confirmed by third-party data sources. This puts Opera’s ad SDK footprint ahead of Twitter (MoPub), AOL (Millennial Media), InMobi, Facebook (LiveRail) and others.
The company’s strategic focus on mobile video yielded strong Q4 results driven largely by the U.S. brand and performance sales team, as well as continued progress in APAC.
The company kicked off 2016 with a new CEO, Will Kassoy, and his leadership team working to align company structure and unifying Opera’s advertising technology platform to fuel continued growth.
Here are some key numbers to report:
- $145.5M in revenue in Q4 2015, over 40% year-over-year increase
- Opera ASA reported overall Q4 2015 revenues of $193.5M
- Opera Mediaworks’ platform reach grew 48% year-over-year to 1.2 billion users globally
- Mobile video continued to make the largest contribution to the Opera Mediaworks platform, comprising 60% of company’s revenues
- 85% year-over-year growth in publishers with $1M+ earnings run rate
- 129% year-over-year growth in programmatic sales
U.S. brand sales fuels growth
The company’s U.S. brand sales team led the way with over 58 new brands advertising for the first time on the Opera platform, including Northup Grumman, Activision, Big Lots and General Motors.
The brand sales team continued to innovate and remain trusted partners for U.S. brands and agencies. As an example, in the last quarter of 2015, Opera Mediaworks launched a haptics-enabled ad with Stoli Vodka that garnered strong, positive results. Stoli leveraged Instant-Play™ video with haptic technology and a dynamic social feed to create an immersive ad experience that delivered results.
The haptic video campaign drove strong video completion metrics and increased video replays by 59%. The video end card featuring 20-second video shorts drove an engagement rate 25X higher than the alcohol benchmark.
Revenue shift towards video continues
As the industry adapts and understands the value of sight, sound and motion to reach and engage the consumer, mobile video continued to make the largest contribution to revenues on the Opera Mediaworks platform. In Q4 2015, video contributed to $87.2 million in revenue (up 69% year over year) or 60% of overall revenues. We expect to see this streak continue in 2016.
Continued focus on growing publisher inventory
While the demand side of things continue to flourish, the company is continues to strengthen high-quality publisher inventory, including names such as Science, Inc., CBS Sports, TV Guide, and Sprint.
The quarter saw an 85% year over year growth in publishers with $1MM+ earnings run rate.
“Q4 2015 has been our strongest quarter so far and we are proud of our teams globally for the achievements in the past year,” said CEO Will Kassoy. “We will continue to deliver real outcomes for our global customers and partners in 2016 and beyond, with a strong focus on data, technology and creativity.”
