Youmi, a mobile advertising platform founded in 2009, announced RMB 100 million new funding led by Shenzhen Cowin last month. The last round of funding, RMB 10 million, was raised more than two years ago.
Youmi was one of the first mobile advertising platforms in China. Currently there are still several dozens of mobile advertising services.
Last year industry people in mobile advertising in China doubted whether the market could grow big in a near future. Guohe, who aggregated all those mobile ad products including Youmi and tried to benefit from economies of scale, decided to ditch the model and shifted focus to mobile game cross promotion over a year ago.
What changed in the past half a year was mobile games started making considerable money. Chen Di estimates that currently the mobile advertising market is about RMB 2 billion.
With more than 80 thousand apps on its platform, Youmi made RMB 60 million in revenue in the first half of 2013 — that’s the number for the whole year of 2012, Chen Di, CEO of Youmi disclosed in an interview (in Chinese).
Based on ad performance, Youmi takes a 40% revenue cut. It’s major clients are mobile games and e-commerce players. The company realized several million yuan in profit last year. Chen’s goal for this year is RMB 100 yuan in total revenue and RMB 20 million in net profit.
Its focus now is apps, but Chen said that they’d expand to mobile Web as traffic there is growing. He expects the traffic will double each year in three years.