Interview with an Evadav.com Representative – Part One

Today we have an interview with a representative of Evadav.com. This person has been in the digital marketing industry for over 15 years, working on promotion across a wide range of projects. He currently represents the push ad network Evadav.com. Let’s get started…

Hey. Many of our readers don’t know you yet — tell us about yourself and the project you represent.
Hey, my name is Gleb. I’ve been in digital marketing for over 15 years, working on both sides of the advertising fence. Advertising, monetization, traffic acquisition, traffic monetization, product positioning, and product launches. I’ve held leadership roles at ISPs and publishing houses, worked in ICO and Forex marketing, participated in launching bookmaker platforms, casinos, and a crypto exchange. In short, I have a broad understanding of the digital space across all verticals — from ad networks and enterprise clients like Visa/MasterCard to adult content and traffic fraud. White hat, black hat, a little bit of everything. Right now, we’re bringing a new ad product to market — advertising via push notification subscriptions.

Is that ad product the ad network Evadav.com?
In terms of what the project actually is — it’s an AdTech platform, Evadav.com. What sets us apart from competitors is that we’re a pure AdTech platform at this stage — we don’t run our own arbitrage or siphon traffic for ourselves, which guarantees transparency for both publishers and advertisers. We have no gaps in ad content moderation because we’re not adding any content on our end. Ad safety for third-party content is the responsibility of the DSPs participating in the auction, which ensures clean ad materials.

Tell us more about the platform — I think readers will find it interesting.
The foundation is the OpenRTB protocol for programmatic advertising. It’s a hot topic, and the format is still in its early stages, but the potential of push notification campaigns is already very clear. Brand Safety at any stage, regardless of where the subscription originated.
The platform has a standard programmatic setup — it includes DSP/SSP components and a DMP layer that’s constantly being expanded. From a technical standpoint, it’s nothing overly complex — it’s essentially a migration of RTB Native into a new distribution channel for ad content.

I think readers already know what push notifications are — we’ve already published articles about this ad format. You can make good money with it. Do you buy push subscriber bases from media buyers?
At this stage, we don’t purchase push subscribers from publishers. Our current model is Revenue Share — a profit-sharing arrangement between the subscription owner (the publisher) and us (the platform). Right now that split is 70% to the publisher and 30% to us.

Do you work with RevShare across all GEOs? Or only specific ones? I know many networks don’t accept US traffic.
Yes, we accept any GEO, including the US. The RevShare principle applies to all participants in the system, regardless of traffic type, vertical, etc. The only traffic we don’t pay for is fraud. Any signs of click bots, fake activity, or similar abuse get flagged immediately and put on a blacklist. We then get confirmation from partners and third-party audit systems, notify the publisher of the suspicious activity, and decide on any penalties.
Fortunately, in every case of anomalous subscriber behavior, all publishers have cooperated with us and quickly removed suspicious sources. The situation is generally manageable and, compared to other formats, easy to monitor.

Which country is currently generating the highest RevShare earnings? And what about traffic from Russia — what are the numbers like?
Traditionally, the top CPMs come from Tier 1 countries: US, UK, CA, AU, NZ, plus all of Scandinavia. After that come EU and Russian traffic — though the Russian situation is more of a temporary anomaly, since the Russian market has an obvious oversupply of advertisers from the media-buying community who are trying to monetize gray and black-hat offers through a format that still allows some content types that classical ad formats block.
An important factor isn’t just geography, but also traffic type, demographic data, and how willing and able the audience is to make purchases. For a number of countries and publishers, this is crucial. High-quality traffic with strong demographics will convert better on product-based push offers, meaning demand for it will be higher — and so will the price. We often see the same traffic volume producing revenue differences of up to 40% between different publishers.

How many pushes does a user receive per day? I know some networks send way too many, which leads to very high unsubscribe rates.
We try not to overload our base. Delivery frequency is built on a heuristic analysis model — in simple terms, without getting too technical, we send the most effective number of impressions for a given audience profile, knowing which content, at what volume, generates maximum revenue. For some users, that might be 1 push per day; for others, it could be one every hour.

Right now, which advertisers dominate the system? What verticals are most common?
It’s hard to say exactly, but based on what we see in daily volume, more than 10,000 ads are being bid on in the system each day. Each region has its own priority verticals — for example, in Germany World of Tanks from Wargaming performs great, while in North America we’ve seen a strong flow of legal advertising. We know that tobacco companies have run trial campaigns, specifically smokeless smoking. Crypto has largely cooled off globally, but Japan and South Korea are exceptions — there’s an all-out war between crypto exchanges for the hearts and minds of local audiences, so crypto is still a top vertical there. Chinese subscribers are being bombarded with gambling and betting content. Most recently, someone was running AliExpress Singles’ Day campaigns worldwide. We don’t know how successful it was, but the sheer volume of that traffic is a clear signal that mainstream brands are starting to take push ads seriously.

I hear that local marketing teams from alcohol brands are gearing up for pilot push campaigns. Black Friday will likely push rates up, since every retailer and their affiliate will be running traffic.
For 2019, you can definitely expect FMCG brands to show up in a pilot capacity on a CPM model — though their entry into push comes with a few open questions. Among the direct competitors, only a handful of companies will be able to serve that kind of inventory to those advertisers.

The interview got quite long so we decided to split it into two parts. That wraps up Part 1. Part 2 will be published on our site next week — so you don’t miss it, follow us on Facebook and Telegram.