IMA

AppsMania - IMA’s 3rd Annual Developers Conference was held in Tel Aviv, Thursday, April 25 and Matomy was one of the gold sponsors at the event.

The event was packed with hundreds of mobile app developers, startup representatives, mobile advertising networks, investors and angels.

The one topic that everyone addressed was monetization or how to make money from your app and it was evident that the market is in search of creative ways to increase app revenues.

The developer poverty line

The morning began with a market research overview from Andreas Pappas a Senior Analyst from VisionMobile who surprised the audience with interesting facts and figures about the app economy and what he called the “developer poverty line” – generating $500 per month from a mobile app.

Pappas was not optimistic about the future of the App Store in general even though he claimed that iOS apps monetize users almost 4 times more than android.

Contrary to what people believe, advertising is the most popular way to monetize apps. The second most popular was pay per download, followed by in app purchases and finally paid subscriptions.

An interesting figure: Apple paid app developers $8 billion since the App Store launched however over half of the apps on the App Store intended for monetization are below the “developer poverty line” of $500 per month.

Perhaps this somewhat rude awakening was not the most optimistic way to start the morning for a lot of eager app developers but for people who can identify opportunities in the market. This free research is very valuable.

How to make a killer game

The mobile war

Game development was a popular topic at the convention. Aaron Bannin, Senior Data Analyst from Gree and Raz Friedman VP Partnerships & New Products at Playtika shared important tips with the game devs in the room.

Bannin recommended using live ops, limited time events and to constantly upgrade the content in the game to increase engagement. One of the more interesting tips that he emphasized was the importance of game icon design on app stores and on the actual phone. Internal research by Gree suggested that a nicely designed icon increases conversion rates by 33%.
Bannin also talked about the rising cost of game development. He said that if two years ago development budgets for a game were about $500,000, today with the improvement of technology and the rising cost of talent, these development budgets are now 10 times more.

Friedman warned about scalability and stability issues in apps and emphasized the importance of support for gamers. He also advised casual game developers to implement a constant feel of progress in the game. He finished his lecture by stressing that new content, images and characters and new levels are key to higher retention rates and LTV.

Won Il Sue, Senior Vice President at Gamevil USA, talked about the free to play model and the Far East markets. He said that the F2P model will be the standard in the industry in the next few years and this will be mutually beneficial for the game developers and the users. Based on the success in South Korea and Japan he advised game developers to look into additional distribution platforms such as IM apps like: Line from Naver and Talk from Kakao.

Blackberry and Windows mobile are still in the game

Microsoft, Nokia and Blackberry are investing a lot in recruiting app developers and incentivizing them to develop apps for their platforms as well. The companies presented a range of ways to get budgets, funding and guaranteed revenue for development if app devs will choose Windows Mobile and Blackberry 10.

The event was an amazing success and was completely packed. I’m sure the IMA will look for a bigger venue next year and feed the growing international demand for the local mobile industry.

Yossi Tarablus
Marketing Manager
Matomy Media Group

Each week, Matomy Money account managers get hundreds of emails with new campaigns and budgets from advertisers of all sizes. One of our biggest challenges is making sure that smaller advertisers are getting the same opportunities for their campaigns as the big fish, both in daily campaign performance and business development.

This is the main reason why we developed the “self-upload & manage” platform for online campaigns. The platform allows all of our advertisers to have real-time campaign control and maximize their campaign results.

How does it work?  Once the advertiser gets an access code to his account he can upload a new campaign to Matomy’s platform in less than a minute. He can also edit the campaign, pause it or end it – as the platform is very intuitive and user friendly.

The feedback from advertisers who already use this tool on a daily basis is, well, this:

“The platform is really easy to use, and gives us easier control over our campaigns.”
“In the time it takes to email my account manager with a request, I have uploaded 2 new campaigns, and they are already live!  Now my account manager and I can focus on expanding our activity”.

I invite you to contact your account manager to get an access code for the system today.  As we say in Matomy – this is a game changer.

Drop me an email for some more information.

Ronen Raveh

Advertiser account manager

As a publisher account manager I constantly search for the best campaigns, the highest payouts and the highest traffic quality possible. However, gamers today are a lot more familiar with virtual currency and all the possible ways to obtain it. They will quickly know how to reach the offer wall, spot a good campaign, and calculate if it’s worth their while to complete the offer or not. 

There are a few questions that I constantly ask:

• How do we keep gamers interested and motivated to earn more?
• How do we surprise them?
• How do we make earning virtual currency faster, easier and most importantly, more enjoyable?

Our research shows a very simple conclusion – offers are a lot like ATMs. The more you spread them around, the easier it is for gamers to obtain virtual currency to spend around the game.

Therefore, my goal is to constantly come up with new ways to reach gamers within the game and outside the offers wall. It’s a bit tricky though, because we want the offers to be presented in an elegant and creative manner that will be within the game flow, and most importantly – with as little interruption as possible.

More experienced publishers may know this, but newer publishers need to understand what goes into a monetization strategy. Many factors are taken into consideration, including the type of app, game flow, user preferences, and demographics. The result is a tailor-made game plan for this publisher. It’s almost needless to say, but the more co-operative the partner is, the better the results will be.

Our in-house revenue statistics back this up. We found out that one optimized placement outside the offer wall increases the publisher revenues by 20%-35% in average.

A 30-60 minute brainstorm with us is all it takes.  With some basic user behavior analysis and best practices, we can customize a game monetization strategy together and see a substantial increase in the publisher’s revenue.

Feel free to drop me an email

Lior Avnery

Publisher Account Manager

Gamescom

I just came back from Cologne Germany where we exhibited in Gamescom – the world’s largest trade fair dedicated only to games. More than 275,000 visitors experienced new titles and innovations from over 600 exhibitors. The show included PC and console games, online and browser games, as well as mobile and social games.

I met a lot of great, new and existing developers and finally talked face-to-face with many of the customers I work with on a daily basis.

The entertainment area, where gaming companies showcased their newest titles, was huge and very impressive! Experiencing live the amazing special effects and hottest new games that our partner have been working on, as well as the amount of exciting young gamers who floated the halls just to try the new games and be a part of this incredible event was unbelievable. Definitely a unique experience!

There are two trends I noticed in the show that relate closely to my daily work:

1. Free to Play is here to stay.
   Many of the biggest publishers in the industry are moving to and expanding their business model to F2P. For example: Ubisoft with “Anno”, “Ghost Recon Online” and the eagerly anticipated “Heroes of Might and Magic Online”, Activision Blizzard with “Call of Duty online” for China, and of course the latest “Star Wars: The Old Republic” from BioWare. We have seen this trend in action among our publishers, as a growing number of partners have switched to the F2P model and are seeing higher revenue from direct and alternative payments.
2. One platform is just not enough.
   Cross-platform games for browser, mobile and PC are gradually becoming the standard to get users more engaged. A few days ago, Zynga unveiled a unified platform to bring players across all major platforms and many publishers are realizing that they have to be available everywhere to increase the amount of playing minutes from each user.
   

   Shai Misrael (left), Negba David and Veronika Livshits

Business aside, the highlight of my experience was the wargaming.net party with a live performance from LMFAO – a night I’ll never forget!!!

We had a great time meeting everyone at the show, signed some great deals, created some excellent long-term relationships and drank too much German beer. I have no doubt that offer walls for virtual currency and other alternative payment methods will grow bigger every year with the growing trend of F2P and as a publisher recruiter in Matomy Money I will have a lot of work making these publishers lots and lots of cash

Shai Misrael
Publisher Recruiter

Shai.m@matomy.com

Leonard Frankel, Raf Keustermans and Branko Milutinovic

The second day of GDC Europe featured the “Facebook Developers Day”. The schedule was packed with tech talks but also a panel of the top publishers on the platform.

Nordeus CEO Branko Milutinovic talked about how “Top Eleven” became the number one sport game on Facebook and gave important tips about starting up with little or no money. Apparently, the way Nordeus achieved its first 10,000 users was through posting on football forums and Facebook groups before they launched the app – or as Branko called it, online guerrilla marketing. These initial users were passionate about football and many of them became the first core gamers. He also recommended localizing to many languages (Top Eleven is available in 32 languages) thus reaching as many players as possible. One of the secrets of the success of Top Eleven is enabling many payment methods on one hand and on the other allowing players to keep playing for free to maintain top ranking.

Raf Keustermans the CEO of Plumbee said that today in order to be a top ten app on Facebook you need to have a significant development staff and budget. “The days when 3 guys in a kitchen develop a top ten app are over”, he said with a nostalgic smile.

Leonard Frankel the Business development manager of Plarium social games said that his best advice for new developers is to focus on one single thing – Fun. Once they find out what is the most fun aspect of their game they need to work up from there with monetization in mind from the initial design. He warned developers not to go crazy and spend thousands of dollars on a large initial user base but to take it step by step.

Mobile gaming is not big anymore… it’s huge.

Richard Firminger the managing director of Flurry captivated the audience with new data from recent research. He showed that 24% of the time spent on media consumption is spent on mobile devices, but only 1% of the advertising budgets are directed to this channel. He went on and showed the difference between tablets and smartphones in consumption patterns and hours. Apparently tablets are much more popular between 19:00 and 22:00 and the average age of a tablet user is 38 – 11 more than the average age of a smartphone user which is 27. Even though games are still the most popular type of apps on the market in terms of consumption minutes, social apps are giving them a run for their money, growing from 15% in Q1 2011 to 24% in Q1 2012.

Before I forget… I went to the Epic Games demo of the new “Unreal 4″ engine and it’s
AMAZING. I can’t wait for Unreal 4. This engine is literally a game changer.

Ok that’s it for today. I’m off to bed I have an early wake-up tomorrow thanks to the bells from the cathedral.

Yossi Tarablus

Marketing Manager

Tal presented a problem common with many of their publishers – engagement measurement. He said that many of their publishers either have no data or too much data about their users’ playing patterns. He proposed a simple technique using “Facebook insight” – Dividing the DAU with the MAU to get the engagement ratio.

Another interesting lecture came from Michael Kalkowsky from GameDuell. His presentation was an analysis of a specific genre of social/casual game, bubble shooting games.

The data he presented was mind-blowing. Arcade style games represent almost half of all Facebook games. From these games bubble shooting games represent a quarter. In numbers: over 80 Million people play a variation of a bubble shooting game every day on Facebook. The majority of these players are women ages 36+.

He showed that the average revenue per day from a bubble shooting game is usually 1 Cent which is very little compared to a Sim game (4 Cents) or casino game (8 Cents) but the average lifetime of a player is substantially higher making up for the low daily revenue. The most interesting part of the lecture was the way GameDuell monetizes players in a seemingly very simple game with a well-known set of rules.

The highlight of the day for me was the lecture of Philip Reisberger. Until recently Phillip was the chief revenue officer of Bigpoint and he talked about flexible pricing for online F2P games. He showed how mainly using cohort analysis Bigpoint upsells and significantly improves the monetization rates from each game. He predicts that the day each player around the world gets a custom monetization offer is not far.

That’s all for the first day. I just hope the weather will stay the same tomorrow.

Yossi Tarablus

Marketing Manager.

The efficiency of in-game premium placements was discussed extensively and we will probably see a significant increase in in-game advertising in the next year, especially with video offers.

As I wrote on my previous blog, video is gaining more and more momentum and publishers are being approached directly by video agencies to implement videos in their game.

One lecture I want to mention came from the CEO of FlowPlay Derrick Morton. Derrick gave a fascinating lecture about the business of virtual goods in his games and the small intricate details that make “OurWorld” one of the most successful games out there.
His extensive knowledge and insights about the virtual goods and especially the digital collectibles that FlowPlay offers were very inspiring and gave many game developers food for thought.

The most impressive part of the presentation was the way FlowPlay monetizes players even after 3 years of playing. An amazing number compared to most Virtual Worlds and MMOs which is less than 1 year.

In conclusion, it was a great conference. I met with new publishers, I talked to some of our existing ones and even the weather was nice.

Ary Cohen
GM Matomy Money

Fraud Protection

A Multi-tiered System
Detecting fraudulent activity requires analysis of short-term and long-term user behavior. It requires meticulous attention to detail and extensive user profiling filters, as well as a more strategic and sophisticated logics system that will help you determine how to treat a user that has committed fraud. Our multi-tiered system utilizes data from a 3^rd party company and integrates it with an intricate logics system tailor-made for the reward advertising industry. Eventually, not even the most sophisticated system can replace human judgment, and therefore it is important to always analyze the results.

Minimizing False-Positives
Blocking fraudulent users is not our only goal, and we aim for a better understanding of when a user is indeed suspicious and when he has made an honest mistake, and adjust our system accordingly.  Sometimes, innocent users are accidently blocked and we continuously work to minimize these incidents. This issue is a top priority for my team and is one of the major parameters for the effectiveness of our system.

Expertise
Our fraud detection and prevention system is based on the knowledge of many people who come from various fields: online gambling, cybercrime, security and spam prevention we consult fraud specialists from all over the world regarding general fraudulent behavior and are constantly updated with the latest online fraud trends. We also maintain close ties with both advertisers and publishers in order to realize what is most troubling to them and handle it promptly.

Finally, as a leading provider of reward advertising solutions, we have learned that analyzing fraud can provide insight into user behavior that has been useful in developing our alternative payment platform.  Combining this knowledge with the experience of our team enables our system to be able to tackle the latest developments in fraud techniques.

Baruchi Malewich
Matomy Money Risk Analyst

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

The market rules are quite clear – the advertiser decides on a certain set of rules. If these rules are followed both sides will profit. The advertiser will achieve his goals, and the user will receive virtual currency.
However, the advertiser-user relationship isn’t always based on trust. Some users wish to take advantage of that set of rules, thus damaging the advertiser’s campaign in the process.
This causes the advertiser to change this set of rules to guarantee the integrity of his campaign. Thus, he will demand better traffic (and reject more users) or will be less willing to pay for the same offers.

This is a simplistic way of looking at things, but this affects everybody: Advertisers spend money on bad users that could’ve brought them good users, and end up demanding better traffic which may be harder to find; Publishers get denials from advertisers and grant points to users they eventually won’t get paid for; and, last but not least, innocent users find it harder to complete offers and some get blocked in the process for failing to meet the growing demands for quality traffic.

The bottom line seems to be simple – we need to match good users with good advertisers, and we need to have the best “matchmaking” tools around. This, to my opinion, is our biggest responsibility as an offer provider. Only this allegedly simple fact is paired with a complicated set of problems and dilemmas.

• Detect a user’s intention to misuse our system
• Reduce the number of good users blocked by our filtering policies
• Keep up with the growing sophistication of fraudulent activity

In my next post I will let you in on how we, in Matomy Money, deal with these problems.

Baruchi Malewich
Matomy Money Risk Analyst

Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Two major topics were very prominent during the summit.

1. Cross-platform engagement is this year’s hit. All major social game developers are seeking multiple engagement points with their users on PCs, mobile phones & tablets.  Currently, mobile app developers are still struggling to reach profitability and prolong user engagement with apps. Statistics show that 90% of the players don’t pass the 8-month playing mark.  The cross-platform approach is meant to boost the user’s playing time and to switch the majority of his activity from the Facebook PC platform to dedicated apps (which is better for the bottom-line as well) .  Also, cross-platform players are going to gradually be exposed to more in-app advertising to increase revenue from this source
2. Videos, Videos and more Video. Everyone is looking into more and more video ads. The innovation in this fast growing advertising medium for virtual currency is with in-game video advertising and CPV+CPA models – what we in Matomy call “View & Do”. For example:  A user watches a video and installs a trial, watches a video and fills in a form, watches a video and…the list goes on..

Lastly, it was interesting to see how many companies are popping up that serve targeted geographic regions.  There are numerous reports and forecasts for the Brazilian gaming market and one of the most interesting people I had the opportunity to meet was from http://jampp.com. This company offers a monetization platform especially for the South American and Brazilian markets – keep an eye on these guys, they are going to be big.

Ary Cohen
GM Matomy Money