Testing for success: Polaris Office found new monetization streams with Moloco SDK

About Polaris Office

Polaris Office is a mobile app for editing and saving documents, spreadsheets, and presentations — anywhere, anytime. With more than 60 global corporate customers and 130 million cloud subscribers, Polaris Office is a leading enterprise productivity tool. 

Challenge: Scaling monetization to grow revenue 

As a workplace productivity tool, Polaris Office has a daunting challenge: competing with Microsoft and Google for users. Yet the Korean company continues to find success. By offering their mobile app’s service for free, the company has been able to acquire over 60 global corporate customers and 130 million cloud subscribers. 

The challenge with keeping the app free is finding alternative revenue streams. The company decided to use in-app advertising, partnering with Moloco to help the company scale its revenue. Initially, Polaris Office found considerable success using Moloco's waterfall SDK, ranking it as one of their top-performing partners. Meanwhile, the app’s user pool grew, and the team started to explore other ways to monetize users, such as subscriptions, but given the successful partnership with Moloco, decided to test Moloco's in-app bidding SDK. 

"We saw a trend of mediation platforms moving away from waterfall towards in-app bidding," Andy Yousung Kim, Sr Monetization Manager at Polaris Office says. "We were aware of Moloco's success on the demand side, and given our continued success with Moloco waterfall SDK, we saw a valuable opportunity to test in-app bidding."

Solution: Comparing Moloco’s in-app SDK to 13 different ad networks‍

To demonstrate the value of the SDK, Polaris Office conducted a two-week A/B test. The plan was to split their traffic, keeping half as a control group and assigning the other half to Moloco.

Despite working with 13 different ad networks, the results with Moloco stood out:

• +15% in ARPDAU for Android
• +10% in ARPDAU for iOS
• Moloco SDK as the top three ad network in average eCPM

"Moloco was our top advertising networks partner with its waterfall SDK," Andy Yousung Kim says. "We were optimistic when we migrated over that the bid density would generate equal or better monetization — but the initial results went beyond our expectation."

Results: Double-digit increases in ARPDAU across both iOS and Google Play‍

Following these successful results, Polaris Office fully adopted Moloco's SDK across all traffic and creative formats. The integration also streamlined their workflow. While other ad network partners resold traffic to third parties, requiring Polaris Office to constantly monitor and update app-ads.txt files* Moloco only serves direct demand, eliminating the need for this extra step.

In addition to the performance boost, Polaris Office praised the ease of integration and implementation with Moloco. The integration guide was straightforward, allowing them to seamlessly incorporate Moloco's in-app bidding alongside other revenue partners.

"Our partnership with Moloco continues to grow. Not only have we been able to carry forward the success we experienced with the waterfall through the Moloco in-app SDK, but we are also very satisfied with the reduction in internal resource costs." says Andy Yousung Kim. 

*App-ads.txt is a file used by app developers to publicly declare authorized digital advertising sellers, helping to prevent unauthorized or fraudulent ad traffic in mobile apps.