One very common way to generate revenue in phone application is through displaying advertisement. This is one of the very effective approach for free app to generate side income. Currently there are only limited number of mobile advertisement supported on Windows Phone 7. Thing is even worse because I live in Malaysia which lot of mobile advertisements did not support for my country.

Using Microsoft Advertising SDK might sound the most easiest way to put some advertisement on your Windows Phone application. But very unfortunately only limited number of countries is supported in  Microsoft  Advertising pubCenter. I only able to found Australia, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, United Kingdom and United States for the country or state option when registering an account for Microsoft Advertising pubCenter. Although they claim they will support more counties in the future, but I bet there will be still a long time until it reach my country.

Next, I found Smaato who they claim supported in many countries and many different platforms that include Windows Phone 7. Well, they did have a very well documented SDK for Windows Phone 7, but supported in many different countries is a question mark for me. Every time my application request an ad from Smaato, it always return an error for me which is ‘no ads available’. At first I though this error is because they haven’t get my account ready yet but after some research, I found out that this error mean there is no ad available for the combination of device/location/category. There is very high chances that I won’t get any ad in near future with Smaato for Windows Phone in my country. If I can’t even get any ad, how can I generate any revenue through advertisement then? It might be work for you, but definably not me.

Lastly, I went through a post on the forum that some one manage to port AdMob SDK to Windows Phone platform, so I decided give it a try. AdMob is one of the popular choices ad provider for Android and iOS platform which had taken over by Google. Although AdMob main page did not mention anything about Windows Phone, but they already had an official SDK for Windows Phone platform (which is in beta currently). Sweet! You need to register an account first before you can see the SDK for download. It is pretty much simple and easy with just a few line of code to get the ad on my app. You can found how easy through the tutorial here.

Since AdMob is the only option for me, then I left no choice but use AdMob only. Hopefully there are more mobile advertisement company support Windows Phone and my country as well in the future.

[Update] This post is outdated, check out my latest post here instead.

by Ooi Keng Siang (Microsoft Student Partners) via Ooiks’s Blog