AdTonos is a world-leading adtech that exponentially increases monetisation for advertisers, publishers and developers. AdTonos’ solutions can integrate into mobile gaming platforms, audiobook platforms, digital audio streams, online radio and podcasts across Europe, the United States, Asia, Africa and LATAM. These solutions operate on smart speakers and voice-assisted mobile devices operating on Android or iOS.  

Building for Success: Wojciech Lichota, CTO and Co-Founder

Wojciech Lichota, Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder of AdTonos, joined the company just over three years ago, and dedicated himself to creating one of Poland’s best R&D teams. Wojciech and his team have built and continue to develop the robust AdTonos platform. Through the team’s efforts, today the platform has an incredible reach of over 1.3 billion HTTP requests per month (~250/S), over 272 million unique listeners monthly, and handles over 65 TB of uploads and 1TB downloads per month. The AdTonos platform also impressively logs over 13 billion DB operations per month (~1.5K/S), and has potential to reach 5 billion ad playouts a month, worldwide as of 2022. 

So what’s behind this phenomenal success? Where is the future of audio adtech headed? In this interview, Wojciech shares his insights into the current challenges and future opportunities for senior and junior developers alike in the digital audio adtech space.

Digital Audio for Developers  

Why is working in audio adtech special? 

Audio advertising – and especially interactive voice advertising – is still a relatively niche, growing segment in online advertising. Because there are less companies out there that work in this space, there are fewer developer roles available in this segment of adtech for the time being. A benefit of this situation is that developers who want to be so much more than just a small cog in a large corporate wheel, and want to play more than just a relatively miniscule part in a project, can thrive here. At Adtonos, all devs work on the whole platform. They can take more ownership over it, and directly see their work contributing towards our growing year on year demand and revenues.

Audio adtechs also allow developers to work on very unique and niche projects. For example, we are managing and planning timelines for a project called “Sounds Green”. This allows unique listeners on podcasts, music streams, audiobooks and mobile gamers to plant trees for free based on the hours of audio that they consume – and here’s the really amazing part – listeners don’t have to change their behaviour at all! If devs want to make the world a better place with their dev skills, projects like this would be very fulfilling.

What is special about the AdTonos platform from a developer’s perspective?

In Poland, most recruiting startups only work on simple mobile apps or CRUD dashboards. AdTonos by contrast, is much more technically complex. Developers have a bigger role to play, and have much more ownership over projects. While this can introduce more of a challenge, this ultimately helps develop more talent with a more robust and diverse skillset. From my own personal experience, working on the AdTonos platform is a massive source of pride for me; it is definitely the biggest project I’ve worked on in my career, which I have worked on for a longer period of time. 

The sheer volume of internal messages we receive each month, to the size of databases, scale of projects and the revenue we see is impressive for developers, and presents them with an unparalleled challenge in Poland. To put this into context, we work hard to ensure optimisation, scaling, and robustness of our platform and its apps, to accommodate 60 million unique users in a month for one of our apps. 

In Poland, there are only around 38 million people in the entire country who have access to the internet. Our client base is almost twice the size of that of the biggest Polish companies. In just 2021, the company grew by over 5 times and reached 272 million unique listeners per month, enabling the playouts of nearly 3 billion advertisements globally (now 5 billion in 2022). Needless to say, there are not many Polish companies that also work worldwide that have the same traffic we do!

Is there higher demand for developers in audio adtech? 

There is a skills gap across adtech as a whole, and audio adtechs are even more niche, as a lot happens in backend developing here, whereas most roles advertised on the market are mainly just website building with basic functionalities. AdTonos promises more dynamic and interesting work for developers, who would interact with more cutting edge technology on a regular basis and develop a more competitive skillset in the market.

We follow a big data approach, and so our developers will process a large volume of data, and will learn to do so in an optimal way by necessity. There is a huge demand for this knowledge in the market. Our projects are mainly backend, so that’s why our projects and adtech projects differ from regular projects. There is a lot happening in the background: tracking, profiling, bidding, collecting persistent data, and of course adapting to the third party cookie apocalypse. So if frontend development isn’t of interest, AdTonos is the perfect place to work!

Wojciech, what are the benefits of working as a developer for an adtech in digital audio like AdTonos?

Working at Adtonos would give developers the opportunity to work on the biggest project they have ever worked on; because of this, their technical skills would become more sophisticated in a much shorter time frame. For example, in my first year at AdTonos, I wrote my own server from scratch to handle VAST requests; this enables us to put our ads in all audio formats.

I have run many large projects for large corporations. In my life before AdTonos, I worked for a software house. My typical week saw me working on many different projects, from small projects for startups, to big solutions for major corporates. AdTonos’ platform is by far the biggest project I have ever worked on. Most of the code on this project was either written by myself or my team, so it is a massive source of pride for me. 

In the second part of our thought leadership series with Wojciech, we will focus more on the challenges that the Adtech industry is currently facing. 

For open positions in our R&D team, visit our careers page.