Israeli startup PushApps promises to monetize your app notifications. It’s just another example of Startup Nation making good.
Based in Herzlia Pituach, PushApps was founded in 2014, has just four employees and has raised $700,000 in capital to date. The company boasts that it provides a “low cost, high quality and reliable push notifications solution for app developers, marketers and app owners.”
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So what exactly does that mean?
Well let’s say that you have an app for your website. And let’s say that your website is a blog which specializes in a specific area of news. For example, let’s say that your blog is dedicated to Jewish business.
Now how does your website make money? Well it has ads which pay it money every time someone clicks on them, more if a product is purchased as a result of the click. This is why everyone reading this always clicks on all of the ads on this website, right.
But this is not always the case and even websites with great traffic have trouble making money. This is because people either do not click on ads or use ad blocking add-ons on their web browsers like Ad Block Plus.
As Inc.com put it, “Mere ad space is a cheaper commodity than dirt. Unless you can target precisely to people who are likely to attend to the ads and act, you offer little value to advertisers. Fifty million visitors who don’t look at ads is worth no more than 500 visitors who don’t look at ads.”
So if you have a blog then you are definitely looking for more sources of revenue.
Now what if you could also monetize your website with the use of an app and your app notifications? This is where PushApps comes in.
PushApps states that it automatically transforms your regular push notifications into “multi-optioned and dynamically optimized notifications.” Users monetize their push notifications without changing anything. And PushApps promises immediate results as well as an experience which will increase user retention.
Asaf Ron is the head of the company’s research and development. He is a graduate of the Israel Defense Forces’ renowned cyber unit 8200. Asaf served in the IDF for 5 years and finished as a Captain.
This is yet further evidence of how military service in Israel helps to drive the success of Startup Nation. Graduates of the high tech 8200 unit are some of Israel’s most successful entrepreneurs.
So how did his service in 8200 help Asaf Ron get a head start in the business world? “It taught me to be persistent and achieve my goals,” he told Jewish Business News.
Asaf explained that PushApps helps its clients earn money by splitting the fees for promoted content with them. And PushApps takes care of all of the work. Its clients need only have an app.
This is not unlike how Google AdSense works. Google handles all of the work and chooses relevant ads based on your content and a client need only have a website to participate. Same with PushApps. So if your blog is about Jewish business then it will “push” notifications for anything related to Jewish issues like maybe Jewish book publishers or hotels in Israel.
Both Google and PushApps offer their clients a share of the ad revenue raised. And that’s not all. Asaf Ron also promises to “increase engagement” with your app/website by adding videos to the notifications which he say will “make them more personal.”
So how does it work? Well the technical aspects are kind of complicated and the average business probably has an outside company which handles these things for them. Basically, a user downloads a file from PushApps which is then loaded into their app.
PushApps currently has ten clients in Israel, Germany and is just starting to move into the U.S. market. Its current clients include the major German publication Der Spiegel and Israeli Hebrew daily newspaper Maariv.
The company anticipates a revenue stream of $10,000 a month this year and hopes to raise as much as $1 million in new capital by the end of 2017. The funds will be used to expand PushApps’ operations, hire more sales reps and to advertise.
OK, so PushApps does not help fight crime or cure diseases like some of the other Israeli startups which we have written recently do. But so what? One of the main causes of the dot.com bubble burst and crash of 2000 was the inability of the way too many startups to monetize their websites. PushApps not only has a way to monetize itself, but also helps small businesses like this one increase their revenues.
