Benefits
33%
reduction in bid-request costs300%
jump in traffic managed600+
games served with ads300,000,000
US bid requests accommodated in 1 week
Using AWS, we can count on our services being up and running with near-zero downtime.
Calle Stenson
Chief Technology Officer, AdvertyAbout Adverty
In the middle of an intense gaming session, an obtrusive ad—which isn’t the ideal way to connect with gamers—can be frustrating. Founded in 2016 in Sweden, advertising company Adverty seeks to help advertisers reach gamers through immersive, unobtrusive in-game ads in mobile games. As a startup with a lean team, Adverty needed support to create a reliable, scalable ad server that connects to about 100 supply-side game publishers and handle billions of bid requests each month. The company chose to build this programmatic advertising solution using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Having successfully developed its solution in 2018, Adverty continues to improve and innovate using AWS.
Optimizing costs for profitability with analytics
Adverty works with over 100 game publishers and serves half a billion ads each month to more than 600 games. With this enormous amount of traffic going through its ad server, Adverty relies on detailed analytics to monitor traffic for profitability. The company uses insights from Amazon QuickSight, which powers data-driven organizations with unified business intelligence. Thus, Adverty can both make data-driven business decisions and stop or increase traffic from different regions, games, and advertisers. Additionally, it helps Adverty to provide insights to advertisers on the performance of their ad campaigns.
“If we handled all traffic, it would cost us more to run the service than what we earn after RevShares,” says Calle Stenson, chief technology officer at Adverty. “Using Amazon QuickSight, we can get an overview of what traffic is profitable and tune the system to generate most revenue for our publishers and us.” Harnessing these insights helped Adverty reduce the cost of handling bids by 33 percent.
Empowering productivity and performance
Using its AWS-powered solution, Adverty grew from an engineer-centric startup to a mature, multidepartment company. “The key benefits of AWS are reliability, flexibility, and the ease of starting new services,” says Mykola Guidash, server-side technology lead at Adverty. These benefits empower Adverty’s small team to manage big projects without a specialized DevOps team. For example, AWS Device Farm, an application testing service, has helped Adverty to test their software development kit at scale on all types of mobile devices.
Additionally, Adverty’s solution on AWS can scale to meet changing traffic needs. In 1 week, the company can manage more than 300,000,000 bids in the United States alone. In fact, in 2024, one of its partners released new games, causing traffic to jump by 300 percent. Adverty’s system, powered by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS)—a managed Kubernetes service—scaled dynamically to create a smooth experience for the company’s end users. “Our customers are happy with service reliability and availability,” says Stenson. “Using AWS, we can count on our services being up and running with near-zero downtime.”
Innovating on AWS
On AWS, Adverty is creating a culture of innovation. The company encourages its employees to try new ideas and think outside the box. As it continues expanding to support additional game engines and to explore new markets, its solution on AWS can scale with it.
“We look forward to our continued growth,” says Stenson. “On AWS, we can support as many games as we want. It usually takes time for innovation to happen, but we are already prepared for new markets.”