RIM woos developers with new ad platform

San Francisco--RIM gave developers yet another reason to stick with BlackBerry when it announced its own advertising platform at the BlackBerry Developer's Conference on Monday. Similar to iAds, the BlackBerry Advertising Service will allow developers to integrate advertising into their applications. RIM will act as mediator and will work with five different ad networks at launch (JumpTap, Amovee, Lat49, Millenial Media, Mojiva) with more ad networks to follow in the coming months.

The ads can be as simple or as rich as developers want, and they can insert the ads with just three lines of code, according to RIM. They can also build ads with one-click access to core BlackBerry applications such as contacts, calendar, the media player, and BlackBerry App World. Developers will also have access to a built-in dashboard that lets them see how the ad campaigns are working. Like Apple's own model, 60 percent of the revenue will go to developers, and RIM keeps the remaining 40 percent. RIM says that this new ad platform allows free apps that are more feature-rich.