China’s Madhouse Expands to India, Ready to Bring Mobile Ads to a Billion More

An example of the Madhouse 'Smartmad' animated ads that are used in China.

Madhouse, the largest mobile ad network in China, is making its way to India in the hope of succeeding in that populous, mobile-loving nation as well. Earlier today, the company announced the founding of Madhouse India and its plan to set up offices across three cities – though it wasn’t specified where those would be.

Madhouse was founded in 2006 and has its HQ in Shanghai. In its initial incarnation in China, it has worked with the likes of Rovio (makers of the Angry Birds games), China Unicom’s (NYSE:CHU; HKG:0762) app store, and has put ads into Freemium EA (NASDAQ:ERTS) mobile games. Rovio, and some of its other existing partners and clients, will stick with Madhouse in its new venture in India, which’ll give the company a running start from day one.

The newly-appointed COO for Madhouse India is Vinod Thadani who said in a press release that the company is “determined to change the face of the Indian digital media landscape and grow the mobile media market from 125 to 1,000 crores within the next 3 years.” That’s an aim to expand the industry to be worth US$203 million by 2015.

The last time we took an overview of India, we saw that it has over 850 million mobile subscribers, and that 59 percent of all web users there only ever access the web on phones. That’s the kind of audience that the new Madhouse India is reaching out to.