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Content Tagged greystripe
Greystripe Monetizing iPhone Games With Ad Platform
The current iPhone App Store revenue share model - a 70/30 split for the sale of apps, generally in the $0.99-$9.99 range - doesn’t exactly reward developers for producing addictive games. Greystripe, an advertising network for mobile games, has stepped in to compensate developers for every time their games are played, not just for when those games are initially sold.
Greystripe has actually been distributing free games and applications for about 1,400 handset models since 2006, mainly through its consumer site GameJump. The site offers mobile gamers a catalog of 800 games from 120 game publishers that can be downloaded directly to phones through mobile browsers. GameJump has experienced 75 million downloads so far, a big jump since last summer when they reached 14 million.
Now the company is turning its attention to the iPhone by providing developers with pre-, interstitial and post-roll ads from advertisers like Best Buy, eBay, Yahoo!, New Line Cinema, the US Army, Wal-Mart and Subway. Greystripe claims it will deliver a 10.1% click-through rate (CTR) when other mobile advertisers are averaging a 1-2% CTR.
To begin competing in a competitive mobile ad market, Greystripe is offering iPhone developers 100% of their in-game ad revenue until they reach $10,000. If you’re an iPhone developer, you can register for the network here.
Other iPhone ad networks include: AppLoop, a recently launched location-based iPhone ad network; AdMob, a browser-based ad network with iPhone-specific advertisements that has served almost 250 million ads; and new-comer Medialets.
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Ads in Mobile Games Get an Eye-popping 10% CTR
There’s a lot of VC money going into web-based, advertising-driven casual games, so here’s a wake-up call to investors: They may get better ROI with mobile phone-based gaming.
In 2006, mobile game platform Greystripe launched GameJump.com, a distribution site for free, ad-supported cellphone games; since then, consumers have downloaded over 65 million copies of Greystripe’s hundreds of titles. The company will publish an extended report of their user data later this week, but were nice enough to give me an advance peek. I’m looking at a lot of surprising numbers, but the most striking one to me is how gamers interact with the ads that appear before and after gameplay.
According to Greystripe, 10.1 percent of them click on the ads, a CTR that far outstrips web ads, which average some 1 percent to 2 percent. I strongly suspect at least some of these are accidental, fumble-thumb click-throughs, but even then, from the advertisers’ perspective, that’s not a bug, but a feature. And while mobile games are almost by definition casual, the demographic breakdown is markedly different from the web-based casual space, which is dominated by older women.
By contrast, 69 percent of the site’s U.S. users are aged 18-34, and 60 percent are male — roughly the same percent that own a PS3/360/Wii game console. So unsurprisingly, the top 20 titles are not just puzzle games, but arcade-flavored titles like Rollercoaster Rush and Bikini Pool Summer, from a studio called, appropriately enough, Guy Games. With data like this, I think we’re going to see a lot more money moving to mobile.
Image credit: GameJump.com
Playyoo Offers Peek Of Its YouTube For Mobile Games
London, England based Playyoo will today announce the launch of its Playyoo Game Contest and give a sneak preview of its community-based platform for mobile casual games at the Adobe MAX event in Chicago.
The Playyoo Game Contest is open to independent mobile game developers using Adobe Flash Lite; prizes include cash and promotional goods. Winners will be selected by Playyoo members based on download popularity and user ratings as at February 28, 2008.
Officially launching in December, Playyoo will offer a sort of YouTube for a mobile gaming that offers free games for mobile phones, user-generated content, social interaction and personal expression. Features will include:
- A “Easy discovery and download process” that will allow mobile phone users to find games of interest through the Playyoo platform. The site will provide personalized recommendations based on each user’s preferences and those of friends.
- Game creation tools that will allow users with no experience to design their own games
- Social networking features that will allow developers and users who interact with others
Playyoo promises an interesting offering that in part seems to be a logical, interactive step forward from the tried and million times cloned YouTube model. Playyoo will compete directly against Greystripe, another company offering free mobile games, but with licensed product as opposed to UGC (see our previous coverage here). I suspect there will be room in the market for both models, the interesting part to watch will be seeing which model becomes the more popular over time.
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Greystripe Hits 14 Million Downloads Of Free Mobile Games
GreyStripe has passed the 14 million downloads mark on its free mobile gaming content site Gamejump.com in just over 12 months.
Gamejump.com’s model provides downloadable mobile gaming content ad supported and free in a market where paid downloads are the norm. Ads are displayed before and after each game.
Greystripe took $8.9million in Series B funding in May, in a round led by Steamboat Ventures, the VC arm of the Walt Disney Company; good credentials for a gaming content provider.
Gamejump.com features 800 games by 70 publishers and includes a variety of genres to appeal to different users. Gamejump has seen users download an average of 3.4 games each and the number of females users downloading games has been fairly close to the number of male users.
Greystripe recently signed a deal with Konami, the publisher of titles including Frogger and Dance Dance Revolution, that will see Konami’s extensive catalog of games being provided for free to Gamejump.com users. The paid mobile download industry likes to label free game services as delivering inferior quality; the provision of Konami content would seem to suggest that this isn’t the case, and certainly it’s a positive sign that the free ad-supported model of mobile gaming may actually be a winner.
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