On the face on facebook of it, the topic of our today’s article by my colleague Zainab is all about something narrow, specific, and unexciting. It’s about how mobile adtech company InMobi intends to work with creators to leverage live-commerce on a short video app and stream this on lock screens of users across India and Southeast Asia. But go a little deeper, and you realise that today’s PR is the crucial culmination of a quest that InMobi has been on for over a decade.
InMobi is a poorly understood company, despite its not insignificant achievements. It’s a product company headquartered in India that’s competing with global giants, operating in a notoriously fickle business—adtech. It was SoftBank’s first investment into India, making it the country’s first unicorn. And its business model has sound unit economics.
However, InMobi had a problem. It’s a two-sided ad network, which by definition, requires InMobi to find and work with advertisers on one side, and with publishers on the other, with InMobi in the middle matching the two together. This meant that InMobi owned neither the content that advertisers wanted to display nor the destination where this content was shown to users.
The number of large adtech companies which had ever succeeded without either controlling the publisher or advertising side is next to nil. InMobi has always wanted to solve this problem anyhow.
So it started with the publishing side. Since it was an adtech company, it understood what users clicked on and enjoyed. So it created a product called Glance, a lock screen app and pre-installed in new Android-run phones from brands like Xiaomi, POCO, Samsung, Vivo and Oppo.
It worked. Glance hit 150 million active users in India in the second quarter of 2021, with “one in four Indian smartphone users” active on the platform, according to a report received analysed.
After conquering the destination, it then went for the advertising content side. It did this by acquiring a short video app called Roposo, which it has now repurposed for live commerce. Then it acquired another company called Shop 101, an e-commerce platform. It took InMobi ten years to get all the pieces in place.
Our Today’s blog is about how InMobi plans to bring them all together.
The question is — will it work?
Today’s story by Zainab is broad, ambitious and breathtaking because it’s about InMobi’s path dependence. Simply put, path dependence means that the source of a company’s competitive advantage comes from what it has done in its past. It’s about the ambition and the perils of a future involving creators, adtech, live-commerce, and video.
You must read it only on www.multimediastudio.net