When the world changes, sometimes you need to change with it. But evolution doesn’t always happen – or sometimes you just end up moving in the wrong direction. This week on “The Big Story,” AdExchanger looks at RockYou’s bankruptcy and, on a much larger scale, the major pain at Kraft Heinz. With RockYou, the publisher-slash-ad […]
Marketers’ push for viewability, ads.txt and GDPR eventually led to the Chapter 7 bankruptcy of RockYou, an ad network and media holding company, on Feb. 13. The bankruptcy filing listed $14.9 million in liabilities to 738 different ad tech companies and publishers. Most notably, RockYou owed $2.1 million to Facebook, where it likely paid to […]
RockYou specializes in acquiring down-and-out digital properties and managing them through their decline. The San Francisco-based company adopted that business model because it nearly went out of business itself in 2009, when Facebook decided it was done with social gaming apps on its platform. At the time, RockYou was a top social gaming app developer […]
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 […]
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 […]
What is the cost of acquiring a loyal app user? Based on the testimonial of various industry insiders, the price is rising so quickly ad revenue can’t keep up. As such, app developers are looking for new ways to profit, often by developing ad tech. Gartner predicts mobile ad spend will reach $18 billion this […]
