mobile - When is the best time to display ads in phone applications

Many online resources suggest you display ads when the app is launched, or when an important action is called (ex. image is being saved), but is it really efficient or rather off-putting?

The reason I am raising this question, is due to massive concurrence on Google Play and Apple App Store. Users have a lot of choice and if your ads are too annoying, but the functions you are offering are the same as someone else, why stay with you?

I would like to hear your thoughts on this.

Answer

Speaking from the user experience point of view - Ads are bad experience

I mean how often you see a pop-up ad and feel... well joyful? No, that's not how it works!

However, ads make a large chunk of app revenue models from a long time now & can't be just neglected. [I belong to school of people who believe that UX people should know business]

So, now we've got a chunk of information (usually flashy with a lot of colours, gifs and probably a blunt call to action - that's how ads are) which we need to push in our experience.

Banner ads & pop-up ads are the two most common way of doing it. The first one to bring a change in this approach was mobile games (I'm pretty sure but don't have a link to give), they attached watching ads to the revenue system of the game. Like you get something in return to watch an ad. Now, this worked out a little bit but, is not doable for most of the other use cases.

For mainstream applications which perform some sort of processing on the device (as I suggested in a comment), I think the best ad placement would be the time while users would have to wait anyways. Since loading is a state which almost empty - it can be used for various purposes.

I recently wrote an article here about various states and how to utilise them as well.

In the sense of business - There are not many options when starting off, so you can't be selective & you have to display what the ad-network has to offer. But once you grow and acquire a good amount of users, You should focus on doing a bit of niche advertisement. This gives a little bit control over how you display & Structure the adverts. Yes, it's tough then simply implementing a pre-existing library and start making money. But, once you crack the right person/company/domain to advertise to your client, there are at least these advantages -

1. With right ads/offers, you can add some value to you users (even with ads)


2. You get better rates for each view


3. you can go beyond just views and get interaction, conversion etc...


4. By doing all this you are innovating in the ad-tech industry which has already crossed a billion dollars market a while back.

I guess I went a little overboard with the surrounding stuff, but I guess that's what someone mentioned here as well, right?

The community shall benefit, so here are my thoughts, lemme know your :)