San Fran­cis­co-based mobile adver­tis­ing start­up Moolah Media has just announced that its lat­est brain­child, a much-pub­li­cized real-time bid­ding plat­form, is being tak­en out of beta.

Why a real-time bid­ding platform?

Moolah has tak­en the grow­ing use of smart­phones and tablets for “retail ther­a­py” seri­ous­ly from the out­set, plac­ing per­for­mance-based mobile phones adver­tis­ing at the fore­front of its mis­sion.  Its new baby lets adver­tis­ers man­age bid­ding on numer­ous ad exchanges and net­works.  The tech­nol­o­gy behind the RTB plat­form is like­ly to appeal strong­ly to mobile adver­tis­ing agen­cies, as it allows adver­tis­ers to deter­mine the exact web­sites where their ads are dis­played and where they aren’t.

Moolah’s CEO, Shawn Scheuer, says that the RTB fea­ture has phe­nom­e­nal speed.  Because the firm posi­tions its serv­ing hubs phys­i­cal­ly near to its part­ners in pub­lish­ing, response times are typ­i­cal­ly under 30 mil­lisec­onds.  Scheuer insists that this is piv­otal, since a pub­lish­er try­ing to com­plete an ad will have to check a range of net­works in a frac­tion of a second.

The new plat­form adds to the company’s pric­ing mod­el, which is per­for­mance based and sup­ports pric­ing deter­mined by clicks (CPC), impres­sions (CPM) and actions (CPA).

Rev­enues dou­ble in one year

At the same time as announc­ing that the RTB plat­form is com­ing out of beta, the firm also let drop that it’s rak­ing in an addi­tion­al $1 mil­lion in rev­enue every month.  Accord­ing to Scheuer, that’s about twice what Moolah was earn­ing this time last year, and he’s con­fi­dent that the fig­ure will dou­ble come next year.

Scheuer makes no pre­tense that his firm’s growth has been smooth.  Instead, like many enter­pris­es, its rev­enue flow fol­lows a pat­tern of remain­ing steady for peri­ods then tak­ing a big step for­ward as new work­ers come on board and gen­er­ate some accel­er­a­tion.  Moolah’s growth would have been even quick­er, Scheuer main­tains, if it had secured exter­nal invest­ment.  By and large, how­ev­er, the VCs he pitched to were too skep­ti­cal that the start­up could make the per­for­mance mod­el work for mobile, a closed door that drove Moolah to con­cen­trate hard on profitability.

Enter­pris­ing types con­tem­plat­ing mak­ing a start in the mobile ad mar­ket might take heed of Scheuer’s sum­ming up.  He said, “I think we’ll prove that you can build a mobile adver­tis­ing com­pa­ny that’s prof­itable, that it can be done at our scale, with­out any exter­nal investment.”