Moloco: Helping mobile app developers thrive

About Moloco

Moloco is an ad tech company in Palo Alto, California that uses a mobile audience platform for user acquisition, engagement, and monetization. The company runs very large ad campaigns for companies to monetize apps and increase their revenue.

Industries: Technology
Location: United States

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

By moving to Google Cloud Platform, Moloco can scale on demand and keep performance high to handle real-time ad bidding on 50 billion daily page views.

Google Cloud Platform Results

  • Scales to support real-time ad bidding with Google Cloud Platform
  • Reduces querying time from several minutes to seconds
  • Improves customer satisfaction and revenue with more effective ad campaigns

Handling more than 550K bid request queries per second

Moloco is on a mission to monetize the app ecosystem. Developers often have a difficult time monetizing their apps, and Moloco runs very large ad campaigns for them to increase their revenue. Moloco achieves this by programmatically bidding on half-a-dozen ad exchanges, including Google AdX and Twitter Mopub, providing access to a combined 50 billion daily impressions on the most popular apps. To generate superior performance for app developers, Moloco needed to dynamically price purchase of ad space on these exchanges within just 100 milliseconds.

“As we grew, we needed an infrastructure that could handle more queries, more data, more storage, and give us sophisticated analytics tools. That’s why we chose Google Cloud Platform.”

Ikkjin Ahn, Founder, Moloco

Moloco needed infrastructure and analytics tools to combine state-of-the-art advances in machine learning technology with infrastructure capable of handling hundreds of thousands of queries per second, in order to deliver better analytics to customers. It wasn’t satisfied with its current cloud provider because its storage costs were expensive and its querying capabilities inadequate. Moloco replaced it with Google Cloud Platform.

“When we started Moloco, we had smaller customers, and our cloud-based solution was adequate,” says Ikkjin Ahn, Founder of Moloco. “But as we grew, we needed an infrastructure that could handle more queries, more data, more storage, and give us sophisticated analytics tools. That’s why we chose Google Cloud Platform.”

Data mining 50 billion page views a day

App developers have trouble acquiring and engaging their users because users often view ads as unnecessary clutter. App developers struggle with marketing channels that provide installations that fail to convert. Additionally, many acquired users demonstrate low engagement and retention rates. Over 90% of apps, even popular apps, fail to ever monetize to the point of profitability.

Moloco Virtual Audience Network (VAN) helps partner app developers bring in revenue by targeting relevant ads to their users when they are using other apps. To do this, Moloco works with app developers to analyze their user behavior and extract the key signals which can be used in mobile advertising. Moloco then uses these signals to bid on ad inventory to serve highly relevant ads to these users when they are using the popular mobile apps.

To accomplish that, Moloco turned to Google Cloud Platform. Moloco reads tens of terabytes of data a day from Google Cloud Storage and creates and updates its prediction model for real-time ad bidding using Google Cloud Dataflow. Google Kubernetes Engine orchestrates Moloco’s bidding servers and handles more than 550,000 queries per second of incoming bid requests. The servers are powered by SSD-based, low-latency Google Cloud Bigtable that performs more than 10,000 queries per second. Google BigQuery provides analytics and dashboards for Moloco and its customers.

“With Google Cloud Platform, we can scale almost overnight to work with 50 billion page views a day,” says Ikkjin. “We’ve built enormous ad campaigns because Google Cloud Platform gives us the best analytical and storage tools possible.”

“Google Cloud Platform has been key to Moloco’s continuing success. Our customers’ ad campaigns are more effective, increasing their revenue. With Google Cloud Platform we’re able to scale quickly and deliver great results.”

Ikkjin Ahn, Founder, Moloco

Faster queries, satisfied customers

Speed is of the essence when building ad campaigns and bidding in real time in ad exchanges. With Google Cloud Platform, Moloco has cut querying time and produced more accurate results for Moloco VAN. Queries that used to take several minutes now take 10 seconds with Google BigQuery. Powered by Google Cloud Bigtable, Moloco VAN now does 550,000 queries per second. As a result, Moloco delivers more effective ad campaigns for app developers. The company is poised for even greater growth.

“Google Cloud Platform has been key to Moloco’s continuing success. Our customers’ ad campaigns are more effective, increasing their revenue,” adds Ikkjin. “With Google Cloud Platform we’re able to scale quickly and deliver great results.”

Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

Contact us

About Moloco

Moloco is an ad tech company in Palo Alto, California that uses a mobile audience platform for user acquisition, engagement, and monetization. The company runs very large ad campaigns for companies to monetize apps and increase their revenue.

Industries: Technology
Location: United States