Here’s today’s AdExchanger.com news round-up… Want it by email? Sign up here Game On Amazon is making a big push into game advertising, if recent job postings spotted by Business Insider are any indication. “We’re looking for the right hands-on engineer to work on a disruptive advertising system set to revolutionize customer acquisition for gamers,” according […]
If Amazon-owned Twitch reaches its goal this year of – according to Bloomberg – doubling its ad sales revenue to $1 billion, it has quite a lot to offer but a lot it must still do. On the plus side, Twitch, the popular video streaming platform that boasts more than 15 million daily active users, […]
Google is going full-court press on universal app campaigns (UAC) through a partnership with Unity Technologies, a company that makes development tools for game creators. Starting Thursday, Unity’s more than 10 million developers have access to advertiser demand from AdMob via a direct integration. It’s the first partnership of this nature between Google and a […]
Machine Zone’s (MZ) experiment with homegrown ad tech is over. The gaming company shuttered Cognant, an internal demand-side platform created in 2016 to help MZ’s media buying team plan, create, buy, optimize and measure marketing campaigns. MZ laid off the entire Cognant team in June, as well as around half of its in-house media buyers, […]
A few years ago, when Twitch CRO Jonathan Simpson-Bint would walk into meetings with agencies and advertisers, they’d cock a dubious eyebrow. “That many people engage on Twitch? You’ve got to be kidding.’ That was the reaction,” said Simpson-Bint, who’s been with Twitch since 2011, three years before Amazon acquired the social gaming and live […]
Why did Time Inc. decide to partner with Etermax, the Buenos Aires-based game studio responsible for the hugely popular app Trivia Crack? a) as a native play b) as a form of content discovery c) to encourage mobile engagement d) all of the above The answer: d. “We’re quickly evolving from being a print company […]
There was a time around 2009 when you couldn’t talk about Zynga without also talking about Facebook. Back then, FarmVille, CityVille and CafeWorld were beyond ubiquitous. But Facebook wasn’t mentioned once on Tuesday during Zynga’s third-quarter earnings call. That’s partially because Facebook’s users are increasingly mobile, with 1.39 billion monthly actives out of 1.55 billion […]
Pangia Games doesn’t have money to waste. What app developer does? Monetization and user acquisition are tricky for anyone – although it certainly helps to have extra cash to throw at the problem. But the smaller devs out there, like Pangia, need to get creative. “We’re a team of two,” said Nick Barbato, managing partner at […]
Monetizing an app is never child’s play, but it becomes even more difficult if the app in question is aimed at children. Clark Stacey, CEO of game publisher WildWorks, knows about those challenges firsthand. Wildworks, which recently rebranded from Smart Bomb Interactive, has been working in close collaboration with the National Geographic Society since 2010 […]
Sometimes, a standalone app might be more trouble than it’s worth – especially if we’re talking about a branded game as part of a single activation. For WWE Studios, a subsidiary of World Wrestling Entertainment that focuses on film development and production, that proved to be the case for “Road to Wrestlemania,” its first-ever mobile […]
Inventory is where it’s at for RockYou. The company, which recently pivoted away from game publishing to focus on becoming a programmatic in-game video ad network, has raised $10 million in funding from FastPay, a sort of anti-VC that extends credit lines to digital media companies. It plans to use the money to buy up […]
You don’t have to be good at math to know that if you only get $3 back on a $4 investment, then there’s something painfully wrong with whatever you’re doing. No one’s more aware of that than game app developers, some of whom spend thousands of dollars on user acquisition daily — though the truly […]
RockYou is clawing its way back. The 8-year-old company, which once produced social games, was one of the first MySpace and Facebook third-party app developers until it suffered a major data breach five years ago that exposed unencrypted user account data of more than 32 million users. That wasn’t RockYou’s only struggle. The company couldn’t […]
Google is ramping up its focus on online gaming by bringing its video ad-skipping tool TrueView to the space. In doing so, Google is making good on a promise Susan Wojcicki, SVP of advertising, made back in February at the IAB Annual Meeting to expand the use of TrueView, which the company sees as a […]
Hooked Media Group announced in a release that it has launched Yoo-Me, “a premium gaming technology platform” that it hopes will create a compelling, publisher monetization solution given the influence of social media today. Prita Uppal, CEO of Hooked Media Group, discussed the announcement with AdExchanger.com. AdExchanger.com: What is broken with the publishing model which […]
