Mihir Shah and the Price of Paying Attention

Mihir Shah sells advertising. He has also spent a considerable part of his public career explaining why people dislike it. That is a useful tension for an advertising executive to carry around. A restaurant owner who suspects the soup needs work has somewhere to begin.

At Tapjoy, where he became chief executive in 2010, the proposition involved virtual goods. A player wanted something inside a game. An advertiser wanted someone to try an app. Tapjoy arranged the introduction, and the player received a reward. The hat, weapon or handful of coins might be imaginary; the commercial arrangement was quite real.

Free games had an awkward question tucked behind the welcome screen: who would pay for them? Shah’s answer gave the player a part in choosing. Engage with an advertiser, receive something useful, keep playing. The arrangement made the ad part of a transaction that a player could understand, rather than a mysterious rectangle competing with the game.

That bargain provides a useful way to read his working life. Social games, smartphone apps and virtual reality have offered different surfaces for it. Each has required somebody to connect a developer who needs revenue with a consumer who would rather be entertained. Shah has repeatedly volunteered for the introduction.

A billion devices, and one gatekeeper

His route into mobile advertising ran through performance marketing and social media. He worked at QuinStreet and led RockYou’s ad network before Tapjoy. These were businesses concerned with what people did after an introduction: whether they clicked, registered or became customers. An attractive placement was only the beginning of the accounting.

By 2011, Tapjoy was proposing a different kind of shop window. Its mobile website recommended apps using information about applications people already had. Shah described excessive choice as a problem. A store full of software could still leave a person wondering what to download. The difficulty was less finding a shelf than finding a recommendation worth trusting.

In March 2012, Tapjoy announced that its website had passed four million registered users. Features being introduced included a revised interface and improved discovery tools. The website mattered because a recommendation could become a destination of its own. Developers did not have to rely entirely on being noticed somewhere inside an enormous store.

The scale grew quickly. By November 2012, Tapjoy reported reaching more than a billion mobile devices, with over 100 million monthly active participants across its developer network. Those are different measurements: devices reached describe distribution; monthly participants describe activity. Neither figure means a billion people were sitting together, eagerly watching an ad.

Yet distribution had a landlord. Apple’s restrictions on incentivized downloads challenged a central part of the model. Shah argued in 2011 that rewarded installs could be excluded from App Store rankings, addressing the ranking concern without removing the mechanism. He was proposing a change to the scoreboard while trying to preserve the game.

He also went public with data comparing Android and iOS activity. His argument was that broader choice on Android produced more engagement. The episode exposed a constraint on any network built inside somebody else’s platform: a company can assemble advertisers, developers and customers, then discover that an operating rule reaches all three at once.

The route to China went through partners

Shah’s Tapjoy interviews were often about distribution in its least glamorous, most necessary form. In July 2012, he explained a partnership with CocoaChina and Gfan intended to help Western developers bring Android games to China. The arrangement linked Tapjoy’s network to a local publisher and an app-store operator.

He emphasized that entering China involved distinct patterns of user acquisition, behavior and monetization. A game could cross a border more easily than its business model. Local partners supplied knowledge and access that a remotely delivered software kit could not provide by itself. The international plan depended on relationships as well as code.

Tapjoy also announced a $5 million Asia fund and named its first three developer partners: Wistone, Red Infinity and Digital Cloud. Supporting the people making games could create more content for the network to distribute. The company was working on both ends of the exchange, helping games exist and helping them find players.

The language around these businesses tends toward frictionless expansion. Shah’s explanation was more practical. Publishing access, local audiences and monetization had to be arranged. Somewhere behind the promise of a global app economy, somebody still needed to make the introductions and agree on how the money would move.

Then the advertisement became a room

After Tapjoy, Shah led Flyby Media, a company working on spatial perception and computer vision. Apple acquired Flyby in 2016, after his period as chief executive. Immersv, which he co-founded in 2015 with John Gentilin, put him back at the intersection of new computing interfaces and the business of getting noticed.

Its early advertising format had an appealing piece of theater. A viewer in a VR app could enter a cinema-like environment and watch a trailer for another experience. Looking at an ad could become the way to interact with it. The advertisement had acquired walls, a screen and somewhere for the customer to sit.

Immersv’s March 2016 launch offered a route from a VR experience to another app without requiring the viewer to remove the headset. That was a small practical problem with commercial consequences. The more awkward the trip from curiosity to installation, the more chances there were for the prospective customer to abandon it.

An Immersv patent application filed that month listed Shah, Gentilin, Andrew Raymond Buck and Jonathan Linsner as inventors on a system for transitioning from a virtual-reality application to an app install. It is a particularly apt entry in his record: the paperwork concerns the moment between wanting something and actually getting it.

The familiar economics survived the change of scenery. In a 2016 conversation, Shah described publisher payments of roughly one or two cents per view, depending on the experience. Immersv retained the difference between its publisher payout and its advertiser charge. Behind the virtual cinema was a thoroughly recognizable cash register.

A forecast meets an ordinary phone

The headset market did not grow on the timetable Shah had expected. In 2017, he acknowledged: “We were far more bullish on VR growth than what actually happened.” For a founder selling a new format, that is a consequential sentence. The audience in the forecast and the audience available to buy are sometimes different crowds.

Immersv expanded its pitch to mobile 360-degree advertising. Viewers could explore an ad’s surroundings, and advertisers could use interactive settings. A baseball stadium or a travel scene could provide the backdrop. The creative ambition remained spatial, but reaching customers no longer depended entirely on persuading them to wear a headset.

Shah was unusually blunt about the starting point. “Mobile advertising sucks,” he said in 2017. The complaint came with a product argument: give viewers more control over the experience. An audience invited to look around might engage differently from one waiting for the close button to become available.

In August 2017, Immersv announced a $10.5 million Series A led by Rogers Venture Partners. Participants included Foundation Capital, The Venture Reality Fund, HTC Vive, GREE and Metaps. Paul Sestili and Gumi founder Hironao Kunimitsu joined the board. The financing brought media, gaming and hardware interests around the same table.

The stated purpose was to develop the technology and expand distribution, including publisher and supply-side integrations. The distinction matters. Financing provides resources to attempt a plan; it does not certify that the plan has succeeded. For Shah, the work still involved persuading publishers to supply inventory and buyers to put money behind a new format.

When Google began experimenting with immersive advertising, Shah welcomed the activity. His reasoning was commercial: more advertising created for the format could benefit Immersv too. Competition could help establish a buying habit. A crowded market brings difficulties, but an empty one also leaves a company doing all the explaining.

“Mobile advertising sucks.”Mihir Shah, 2017

The interface changes. The introduction remains.

The later chapters broadened the setting. Shah became CEO of Motimatic in 2020, leading the education technology company through January 2024. Its work applied behavioral science and digital communication to student enrollment and engagement. The audience and purpose had changed, while the challenge of prompting someone to take a next step remained recognizable.

Crossfill, which he co-founded in 2024, works on how brands appear in AI-driven discovery. Its company description focuses on understanding brand visibility in systems such as ChatGPT, Google AI and Perplexity. A business once concerned with appearing in an app recommendation can now be concerned with appearing in a generated answer.

The parallel is an interpretation of the career, rather than a claim that these markets work alike. An app-install ad, an educational message and an AI recommendation involve different choices and obligations. What connects the assignments is the commercial importance of the encounter: who is seen, in which setting, and what happens afterward.

Since September 2024, he has served as General Manager, Ads & Rewards at Xsolla. The assignment returns him to game creators, audience growth and advertising revenue. Immersv belongs to an earlier chapter, but the practical questions that animated it remain close at hand.

In an industry that can describe every new screen as a fresh beginning, Shah’s record offers the pleasure of continuity. A better interface still needs content. Content needs an audience. Somebody must pay the people who make it. He has moved between the companies trying to join those facts together, with varying formats and familiar arithmetic.

There is something nicely human about the persistent problem underneath all this machinery. People want help finding things they will enjoy, and they resent having their time treated as somebody else’s inventory. Shah’s career keeps approaching that negotiation. Even inside a virtual theater, the customer has to decide whether the trailer is worth watching.