There is a part of the internet that Google and Meta do not own. It is large. It is growing. And according to one Indian technology entrepreneur, it is where the most interesting opportunities in digital advertising now exist.
Ishank Joshi is the chief executive of Mobavenue. He founded the Mumbai-based company in 2017 alongside his co-founders. Before that, he had spent years working inside publishing and app development. That experience taught him something important. The advertising market was being squeezed into two corners. Most of the money flowed to Google and Meta. Everything else was fighting for the scraps.
He did not see that as a threat. He saw it as an opening. “We are not trying to compete with Google or Meta,” Joshi told Storyboard18 in a recent interview. “We are building for the space they cannot fully control.”
That space is what he calls the open internet. It includes independent news websites, streaming services, gaming platforms, connected television screens and digital advertising boards in public spaces. No single company owns all of it. No single company sets all the rules. That is precisely what makes it attractive to Joshi and to the brands that work with Mobavenue.
The company’s business model rests on a technology called programmatic advertising. This is the process by which advertisements are bought and placed automatically in real time. When a person opens a webpage or an application, a rapid automated process takes place in the background. Within a fraction of a second, the system decides which advertisement to show and at what price. Mobavenue’s platform handles that process for more than 150 clients across global markets.
Three products sit at the centre of what Mobavenue offers. The first is called PrsmX. It places video advertisements across multiple types of screens, from mobile phones to smart televisions to outdoor digital displays. The second is called SurgeX. It is designed to help brands attract new customers by processing advertising bids automatically across the open internet. The third is called ReSurgeX. It targets people who have previously shown interest in a product but have not yet purchased it. Each product addresses a different stage of the relationship between a brand and a potential customer.
The timing of Mobavenue’s founding turned out to be well chosen. Two developments transformed India’s internet market around 2015 and 2016. The first was the launch of UPI, the payment system that made digital money transfers simple and accessible to hundreds of millions of people. The second was Reliance Jio, which brought affordable mobile data to vast numbers of Indians who had previously been priced out. Together these two developments brought an enormous new population online. Many of those users did not arrive through Facebook or Google. They came through local news apps, games, streaming services and messaging platforms outside the main ecosystems. Mobavenue was built specifically to reach them.
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A separate shift in how advertising technology works has also worked in the company’s favour. For years, the industry relied on tracking small files stored in web browsers to follow users across websites and serve them targeted advertising. That practice is being phased out. Regulatory changes across Europe and data protection rules in multiple countries have made it harder to track users without their explicit knowledge. Browsers have moved to block or limit the tracking files entirely.
This change hurt businesses built around cross-site tracking. It helped businesses like Mobavenue. The company was built from the start around working with data that users have actively agreed to share. It does not depend on following people invisibly across the internet. That approach is now what regulators in most major markets are pushing the entire industry toward.
Joshi is careful in how he speaks about the dominant platforms. He does not dismiss them. He does not argue that brands should avoid them. His point is narrower and more specific. Google and Meta are excellent at what they do within their own platforms. But they do not own everything. The audiences that exist outside those platforms are real, large and underserved. Brands that put all of their advertising budget into two platforms are taking on a concentration risk that many of them have only recently begun to recognise.
Mobavenue’s cloud infrastructure was built over three years specifically to handle the speed and scale that programmatic advertising demands. The platform processes millions of individual decisions simultaneously. It was designed that way from the beginning rather than being adapted from a system built for something else.
The open internet is not a consolation prize. That is the argument Joshi has been making since 2017. The evidence he is gathering suggests more brands are starting to listen.
https://www.storyboard18.com/digital/we-are-not-trying-to-compete-with-google-or-meta-mobavenue-ceo-on-building-outside-the-walled-gardens-102398.htm
