Toronto Native Ad Platform Polar Hits 1 Billion Mobile Impression Milestone

Toronto-based native advertising platform Polar has just passed the 1 billion mobile native ads served milestone.

“1-billion native ads on mobile and over 3-billion across all devices gives us unique aggregate data on how these placements are performing for publishers and how readers are engaging with sponsored content,” said Polar CEO Kunal Gupta. “No one else has this unparalleled access to sponsored content trends, or can help publishers understand what direction native is heading the way we have been able to.”

Native advertising is the increasingly common (and somewhat controversial) practice of presenting ads in the form of regular news or editorial content.

Polar has demonstrated, through analysis of over 4 billion ads, how mobile advertising outperforms desktop with a clickthrough rate over 57% higher. Mobile readers also spend 33% longer looking at native ads, compared to desktop.

Polar counts over 700 companies among its clients, including Condé Nast, Hearst, Telegraph, The Washington Post, Associated Press and Slate.

“With Polar, mobile isn’t an afterthought – it’s an essential part of native advertising,” said Anthony DeMaio, Associate Publisher, Vice President of National Sales, Slate. “We chose MediaVoice to serve our native advertising as it spoke to every aspect of our sponsored content program: utilizing our content management system (CMS), integrating with our ad server, and pushing to mobile.”

Founded in 2007, Polar Mobile raised a $6 million fundraising round led by Georgian Capital Partners two years ago, before launching its MediaVoice advertising platform in 2013.

Among MediaVoice’s first clients were the Globe & Mail, the Toronto Star and the Financial Post.

MediaVoice is a platform that allows Polar clients to publish native ads in their existing CMS, saving the need to manually reformat native ads for mobile viewing.

Business Insider has pegged the size of the native advertising market at over $8 billion in 2014, forecasting its growth to $10.7 billion in 2015.