Monetizing cross-platform use cases faster and easier with Qt Digital Advertising Platform

Many of you have been raising the question: when will Qt provide a full framework to monetize my Qt-based cross-platform application, implementing an advertising campaign directly on my user interface?  

Now all the community and Qt users in general can start in no time implementing and managing advertising campaigns targeting cross-platform use cases. We are excited to announce that Qt Digital Advertising 1.0 has been released! 

Qt Digital Advertising helps you monetize any screen built with Qt  

But what is Qt Digital Advertising? It is a ready-made plugin to install from your Qt maintenance tool instance, allowing you to connect your application to a dedicated Supply Side Platform (SSP). With the tool, you can manage and run monetization campaigns on your Qt-based application.  

Our focus is to fill an existing gap in the Qt framework for developers using Qt for mobile and desktop applications. We want to enable the easy integration of advertising. Our offering aims to disrupt the IoT industry, enabling new business models and business cases that before were not possible. We enable Qt users to insert advertising as a native component to complex user interfaces.

Here is an example of our Oven Demo, with Qt Digital Advertising applied to it, showing how advertising can be displayed as part of the user experience of the Qt-based application.

Example of the high-end appliance: 

Example of the mobile companion app:  

 How to start the advertising with Qt Digital Advertising Plugin
 
Qt Digital Advertising Plugin is a separate component in Installer. You install the plugin like any other product at Qt. You can find Digital Advertising Plugin under Additional Libraries, under your Qt preferred release (starting from 5.15.x). To benefit from the full potential of Qt Digital Ads Plugin, we strongly recommend downloading Qt Design Studio and Qt Creator from Installer.  

Adding the Advertising Placeholder in your Qt Application

The plugin provides a component for Design Studio (From Qt DS 2.2) and a precompiled Library for your Qt installation (from Qt 5.15.x version). 

Qt Design Studio 

How to add the plugin component in Qt Design Studio? Pretty straightforward. Add Module to your component library and drag and drop your ad placeholder. It could be either embedded or mobile (desktop goes within mobile). You can extend or minimize the size of the ad placeholder straight in Design Studio. Place your ad placeholder where you want within your screen in different formats, be it a video or a static banner ad. You can also edit the properties of additional settings you would like to add to your ad environment, like venue ID – connection to the server hosting the ad. And finally, you can switch from Form Editor to Text Editor to see the plain QML code on the ad placeholder settings you set up. You can also add that code into Qt Creator and run it from there.  

Video on how to set up your ad placeholder in Qt Design Studio: 

Qt Creator 

Adding Digital Advertising Plugin in Qt Creator is also a pretty straightforward process. After you install both Qt Digital Advertising Plugin and Qt Creator, you need to add a plugin import statement.  

Now you can add your ad placeholder environment and ad properties in plain QML code at Qt Creator.  

Documentation and examples on Digital Advertising Plugin

Here is our documentation link on how to use Digital Advertising Plugin with Qt Creator: https://doc.qt.io/QtDigitalAdvertising/creator.html 

API reference for QML types - https://doc.qt.io/QtDigitalAdvertising/qml-types.html 

Set of APIs as an example for Mobile and Embedded ads: 

Full documentation on how to use Qt Digital Advertising can be found here:   https://doc.qt.io/QtDigitalAdvertising/index.html 

Looking for examples to start with?

Check out our embedded and mobile examples and experience how easy it is to manage different advertising content for your target platform. The videos for mobile and embedded examples are in gif format: 

Managing your Ads campaign

Once you have placed the advertising placeholder in your application, it’s time to define the advertising campaign. 

There are two options for managing the ads:  

1.  You can manage your own ad campaigns via the Direct Ad Serving option. In this case you use our technology but deal with advertisers directly.  
2. You can leverage a programmatic approach, where advertisers will be bidding for your ad placeholder in your Qt application, offering a cost per mile to display specific contents in your use case. In this case, you fully benefit of Open Exchange where many advertisers will bid for the ad space in your application.  

After you have evaluated the plugin in your device, we will guide you on connecting to the dedicated SSP, depending on your use case. 

What’s next? 

Qt delivers for the very first time a tool for its developers to help them maximize their revenue. Qt developers can turn their embedded and mobile devices and applications into money-making machines. For the rest of 2022, we will focus on new tools to make your ad development workflow simpler and faster. Simultaneously we will add up new partners and technologies to help our users and developers generate revenue in the most efficient way possible.  

It is a new product for Qt and we would appreciate gathering feedback as early as possible.  

Do you want to try out Qt Digital Advertising? You can use the tools regardless of the type of Qt license you have. Please visit our Digital Advertising Platform page to start your evaluation journey. 

Come and hear everything about the new Qt Digital Advertising offering! Join our webinar "Turn your product into a revenue machine with the new Qt Digital Advertising platform" on Tuesday, February 22 at 5 pm (CET). Register here!