mobile spy tool (13)
I know that STM has the adult spy tool and there are a few third party ones out there as well, but I haven't seen any mobile spy tools. Are there any mobile spy tools out there?
did you check whatrunswhere ?
they have mobile aswell
Thing with mobile spy tools they're based off wifi traffic, so you don't get to see most of the mobile world. Reason its hard to create a mobile spy I'm pretty sure you physically need to have contracts in countries for multiple types of phones, on multiple types of carriers to see everything.
But this is why mobile is sooooo great, its pretty difficult to see everything out there so successful campaigns can last for a long long time haha!
I have an idea for a mobile spy "tool". It goes like this: we have an app developed for android and iOS which extracts ads from 15 varied high-traffic websites and 5-6 different apps -- all up about 20 sources, covering at least 6-7 top mobile traffic networks.
We all install the app. Source code is made readily available to ensure nothing funny is being done.
The banners are extracted and the landing page URLs saved. This information package is uploaded to a service that STM runs. To retain access to see other people's packages (hehe) each member must upload a package every week - all on cell traffic (not Wi-Fi, which is ridiculously easy to spy on for all countries).
I thought about this because years ago I was part of an SEO circle where us (10 guys) boosted each others links every week on 20 different social platforms. It worked really well. If you didn't publish other's links, your link was taken out of rotation for the next week.
I have 10 ipod touch and few android phone which I can use
Originally Posted by redrummr
Do you have the source for this already ready to go or just speaking hypothetically?
I wonder how difficult it is to scrape ads from apps. I know for sites it's pretty easy.
I have 2 iphones and 1 andorid device both on data networks(not wifi) in Canada. Let's get it going redrummr!
Originally Posted by bbrock32
Working on the wi-fi version, which won't require the crowd-sourcing part. I will be listing several tools/cloakers/scripts/services in the Buy/Sell forum in the next 60 days (1 or 2 things for mobile). I can certainly see the cell traffic version happening soon, it's just a bit more of a hassle to implement due to the human cogs in the wheel!
Interacting with apps and pulling screenshots and header info post-click isn't too hard, it's all about defining the areas where the ads are located. I was looking at spending many thousands on a coder but there are some easier ways to go about it without digging into the SDK. Though I am sure I'm not the only person who's working on a spy service.
EDIT: iOS is significantly harder.
Paulis1, if I need your help I'll get back to you! Thanks
Do you mean a background app or a browser app where the downloaded content is logged > stored > uploaded?
This is a great idea although at the same time I feel like we'd be sullying the expansive, untainted wilderness of carrier-based mobile ads, where little 320x50 bo peep roams free in the nude with no predators in sight.
I was actually thinking of a identical idea while trying to snoop out a good mobile spy tool.
I was thinking in order to get it to work you could create a browser style app for both platforms iOS / Android and name is something like "Crowd Browse" and then get users to surf as they normally would.
The app itself could have code written into it that it recognizes shapes in the mobile browsers that meet ad unit sizes, any time one of those size images appears it would download a copy of that image to a server (not necessarily the users phone).
In order to get it to work you could offer users a cut of the spy tool revenue in order for using the app on a regular basis. Say the spy tool generates 20k a month, you might split 5k across a ton of different users who make a couple bucks for using that browser over default like chrome.
You could also build in widgets in the browsers where users could mark certain ads as "standing out" or appear to be engaging. Almost like an upvote kind of thing.
I think the difficulty in this spy tool comes in getting suers to adopt the browser but also having enough of a sample size from each geo with a decent break down of users in each age bracket.
Not that it couldn't be accomplished it would just be a huge obstacle lol
Your idea won't work as you need to iframe a site, and iframing means the top window cannot attach onto any elements of the framed page (unless it's the same domain).
There could be some use in signing up with the ad networks to deliver impressions to a domain that is owned by the services, so you can display all competing ad networks' inventory. As long as traffic is kept fairly low we could limit being blacklisted by the big affiliates. But premium networks won't work with just any site - scraping from top placements is always better.
What my service does is flag any ads and URLs that are, for example, being run in top inventory (first 10 refreshes) at InMobi and mMedia or any other networks. That way you know the affiliate has scaled. Services like Social ad Ninja and others have pissed me off by not being clear about average position of ad (whether top-right in FB, or if it was found after 3 refreshes). It indicates strength of advertising dollar... High bids and good CTR is better placement.
The Android solution is easy, even for cellular data, and a lot of the game is just porting things across... I'm not sure if iOS is actually required. It's a real bitch for cell spying, but Wi-Fi can be done and automated very easily (hint: if you have a Mac computer). Cell data nope unless you know Objective-C and fancy writing 10,000 lines or outsourcing for a dollar per line
The thing that makes mobile so good is that it's so hard to spy 
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