One of the big challenges for children’s app developers is the reluctance of many parents to pay upfront for apps, even if they distrust in-app purchases.

Could advertising be the answer? Ads as the funding source for children’s media is well established in the television and magazine industries, but apps have proved a tougher nut to crack for developers and brands alike.

It’s not hard to put ads in a children’s app, but ensuring that they’re appropriate for kids – no gambling, premium subscription and adult-rated games for example – has been a challenge.

British startup SuperAwesome is hoping to change that, releasing a new software development kit (SDK) for Android and iOS developers that it says will add child-safe ads to children’s apps with “a single line of code”.

The company is pitching the SDK as “Stripe for kids advertising”, referring to the famously easy-to-integrate mobile payment technology.

In this case, though, what developers are integrating are display and video ads, which SuperAwesome says are fully compliant with the US Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) legislation that’s become the chief standard by which children’s apps are judged around the world.

SuperAwesome claims that its advertising network already reaches more than 100m children a month in the UK, US, Australia and France, with brands including Mattel, Hasbro, Disney and Warner Bros advertising through it in apps from publishers including Rovio (Angry Birds), Outfit7 (Talking Friends) and ZeptoLabs (Cut the Rope).

“Content developers can just drop in a single line of code and they immediately have a kid-safe, COPPA compliant advertising solution,” said SuperAwesome’s chief product officer Joshua Wohle, about the new SDK.

“The kids advertising industry requires the highest standard of compliance and brand safety in the world,” added head of mobile Adam Holmes. “For all our brand partners, this means a more streamlined way of reaching this audience.”

A company like SuperAwesome can divide opinion: sceptics may see a firm focused on showing ads to hundreds of millions of children on their most personal devices as decidedly un-awesome or super.

If advertising is to play a greater role in the children’s apps world, however, the existence of a network focused purely on child-safe ads is a good thing, given some of the past mis-steps in this area.

One of SuperAwesome’s clients, Outfit7, knows this better than most. In October 2012, adverts for payday lender Wonga offering “cash loans up to £400” were found in its Talking Ginger app, while in February 2013, its Talking Friends Cartoons app carried ads leading to a £4-a-week ringtones and wallpapers subscription service.

In July 2013, UK regulator PhonepayPlus fined Australian firm CommandM PTY £250,000 for a ‘misleading’ app selling £4.50-a-week premium rate subscriptions, which was advertised within a range of children’s apps.

Then, in August 2014, PhonepayPlus fined French company Acetelecom £60,000 for a premium rate “voice changer” service that was also advertised in children’s apps, charging £1 per minute for calls from children – some of which went on for more than 90 minutes.

In cases like these, the children’s app developers didn’t strike individual deals with those advertisers. Instead, they made advertising space available within their apps to third-party mobile ad networks, which took responsibility for filling that inventory, without effective enough safeguards to bar inappropriate ads.

SuperAwesome is hoping that its mobile ad network just for children will avoid these pitfalls, while also attracting the kind of big children’s brands who are considering shifting some of their ad budgets from trusted media like TV and print to apps.

SuperAwesome chief executive Dylan Collins has argued publicly that advertising will be essential to the survival of responsible, original children’s apps developers, even if many are still focusing on paid rather than ad-supported apps.

“We make less money in our mobile digital content than a lot of other sectors, and there is huge pressure on marketing costs. The cost of actually getting [content] to kids in a meaningful way has gone up. It’s a basic maths equation: our revenue has come down and our marketing costs have come up,” he said in a speech at the Children’s Media Conference in July.

“Fundamentally, the maths on that does not stack up. If you talk to kids’ apps developers, there’s not a single one who are not a little bit concerned about the sustainability of their industry over the next one, two, five years.”

• It’s time more parents started paying for children’s apps