So about a month ago Corona finally put out a new Chartboost and Adcolony plugin and my experience has been a failure.
The first thing was the setup, you have to go through Corona which acts as an intermediary and they setup the settings for you, it took about a week of back and forth to get things right with Chartboost. Also you have no control over the adnetwork itself to tweek it, you have to email corona to do it for you. On top of that you can’t integrate with app analysis tools like App Annie.
Second the ad reporting tool on CoronaAds-parenter networks doesn’t give you too much information on how your doing, and it’s constantly down or not working giving you no ad data. It’s currently not displaying any information for me now.
Third, my ECPM went down by 50%, now I may have been partly responsible for this by adding video ads and changing my ad frequency algorithms, but I honestly expected to make more money or at least the same as using the old Chartboost Swipeware plugin. At least the ECPM should not have gone down by as much as 50%
Unfortunately I lost not only time but also money on this plugin solution Corona offered and I have since dumped it and will never use it again. And I can’t go back to the old Chartboost plugin because Corona labs disabled it and I can no longer build with it.
I have no problems giving Corona 5% of ad revenue, what truly sucks is not having control over your own ad networks and as someone with a serious App this is just unacceptable. I hope Corona reconsiders their strategy and instead offer paid plugins or at the very least re-enable old existing ones that worked fine.