Are multiple AdMob Ads on RecyclerView permitted? Alternative Ad Network?

Question

A lot of app (like facebook, twitter) have a stream of contents and every n times they put ads (called sponsored posts).

I have an app that show a list of items and I put an admob ad every 6 elements. The list of elements is not fixed and I can have from 0 to 250 items.

With the actually implementation I have a unique ad id so all banner have (obviously) the same content.

So i would create manually +40 ads on AdMob site...and assign programmatically on recycler.

On AdMob I read:

The number of ads on a single screen should not exceed one if the ad is fixed to the screen top or screen bottom. If the page scrolls, only one ad should be visible on the screen at a time, and, according to the AdSense program policies, publishers may place no more than 3 ad units on one entire page.

How can app like facebook or other show multiple ads on a scrolling page? Does exist any ad network that permit this?

Answer 1

I don't know how other networks handle things, but you can definitely make this work with AdMob's Native Ads Express. It's a new ad format that AdMob introduced a few weeks ago at I/O 2016.

I would suggest the following:

• Register a new ad unit ID at https://apps.admob.com and choose Native Ads Express. You'll only need one. Pick a small template size and a template that works for your app. You can customize colors and fonts to match your UI.

• In your activity, maintain a list of NativeExpressAdView objects that you've instantiated and loaded ads into (loading an ad for Native Ads Express works essentially the same as for banners). You should only need a few to start.

• When your RecyclerView scrolls to the point that you need an ad, use one from the list and note the index. Then add a new NativeExpressAdView to the end of the list so you can load another ad in case the user keeps scrolling. If the user scrolls back up, you know which NativeExpressAdView goes with which index, and you can act accordingly.

Some things I'd recommend avoiding:

• Make sure you don't have more than one ad onscreen at once. This is the big policy concern here. You may need to show an ad once every six items on one device, versus once every eight items on a larger device, etc. The "three ads per page" rule you quote is (I believe) an AdSense rule for websites, and not applicable to AdMob.

• Don't load all the ads necessary to fill the entire list at once. 250/6 = ~40 ads, which is a big chunk of data, especially if the user never makes it all the way down.