Norwegian browser company Opera, has spun off its advertising business as a new entity called Opera Mediaworks. The company says that this entity will be fully owned by Opera and will focus on providing advertising, content distribution and monetization services to the mobile marketplaces. Opera previously managed its advertising platform as a part of the parent company. Opera claims that its advertising platform caters to more than 80,000 mobile sites and mobile applications, and manages around 50 billion ad impressions per month. Interestingly, the company claims that Opera Mediaworks is currently the world's largest mobile ad platform.Opera had recently claimed to have around 300 million monthly users across its desktop and mobile platform, including 237 million monthly users on the mobile platform. Opera Mediaworks Performance: Coinciding with this spin-off, Opera has also launched a performance-based mobile advertising platform called Opera Mediaworks Performance. The company states that this platform will provide advertisers with real-time targeting tools and reporting on mobile ad campaigns. Offerings: Besides this, Opera noted that Opera Mediaworks will focus on four service areas namely Ad-mediation, ad-exchange and real-time bidding (RTB) through its AdMarvel and Opera Mediaworks Ad Exchange; Mobile Ad agency and networks through Mobile Theory and 4th Screen Advertising, Opera Mobile Store and Opera Payment Exchange. Why did it spin off? We believe that Opera has made this spin off to consolidate all its mobile ads business and create a unified brand entity to advertisers, publishers, mobile operators and others, while the parent company focuses on developing the browser. Interestingly, this would also mean that Opera will be providing segmented results…
