Hubbl App's Spacebar Platform Uses Contextual Ads to Promote Apps
So, you’ve built what you’re sure will be the next big mobile app. Now all you need is for more people to discover it. How can you drive awareness to your target audience? Hubbl has one answer.
Launched October 1, 2013, Hubbl, which calls itself an “app relevancy engine,” is itself an app, available for iOS and Android, that helps people discover other apps based on their interests. Users can search apps based on popularity among their friends, prevalence in the news, and crowdsourced hashtags such as #Music, #NewsAggregators, or even #AwesomeUx/UI. This provides a discovery experience more tailored than the iOS App Store’s lists of top downloaded apps.
For those who don’t want to go to the trouble of installing an app just to search for other apps, Hubbl last month launched a new feature for iPhone customers: integration with Apple’s Passbook. Adding the Hubbl pass will send a new app offer to Passbook every day. This “Deal of the Day” includes normally paid apps that users can download for free that day only. Even if the user doesn’t have the native app installed, Hubbl can figure out the user’s interests by what they click on and will recommend new apps based on their personal preferences.
Now, Hubbl is adding another app discovery method to its arsenal with its B2B platform, Spacebar. Through partnerships with publishers and other content distributors, Hubbl’s Spacebar will suggest apps based on the subject matter of the webpage the user is looking at—a sort of contextual advertising.
In a VentureBeat article about the platform, Hubbl CEO Kushal Choksi said, “We’re trying to bring people out of the cost-per-install mode of thinking. If you show the right app to the right people in the right setting and respect that relevancy, then the install and engagement will follow.”
For instance, if a user is browsing the Travel section of a newspaper’s mobile site on his phone, a Spacebar may be displayed suggesting the user download apps for the newspaper, for booking flights, and for finding deals on hotels. If a user is looking at a recipe on a food blog, the Spacebar could recommend various cooking and grocery store apps.
Choksi hopes the idea will draw developers, especially considering that the price is pretty attractive: Spacebar campaigns start at $50.
Publishers should like it, too, because Spacebars are designed to look like part of the webpages. Hubbl’s app suggestions are embedded on the website in widget format, and content providers can choose custom Spacebars along with what apps will be displayed.
“With Spacebar we’re putting your app in front of the people who would be interested in it—and we’re making it look as native as possible,” Choksi said.
