Monday, March 10, 2008
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Social networking boom offers mobile games industry a boost
HELSINKI (Reuters) A boom in social networking and a new delivery platform from Nokia offer mobile video game publishers a boost after a slowdown in 2007.The mobile gaming market suffered an unexpected slump last year, with many game developers and analysts pointing to telecom operators’ lack of interest in investing in marketing games.Now they are looking at booming takeup of new social networking sites, aiming to market the games on those sites themselves.Digital Chocolate, one of the few global game publishers, has put its hit game Tower Bloxx on several networking and gaming sites on the Internet. The game was installed more than 400,000 times in just four months on Facebook.“The takeup has been better than any of our expectations,” said Ilkka Paananen, head of game development at Digital Chocolate. “This year we will support all our key products with similar kind of marketing.” Media research firm M:Metrics said the number of people who bought mobile games in the United States and Europe last year was almost unchanged from a year ago, with pre-loaded games growing in popularity.“The mobile games segment has been stuck in a rut for a long time now, with less than 5 per cent of subscribers actually buying and playing games,” said Informa analyst Daniel Winterbottom.“Operators have spent very little on the marketing and promotion of new game titles,” Winterbottom said, adding that around 90 per cent of mobile game purchases have been through operator portals.Informa expects revenues from mobile games to grow 23 per cent this year to $4 billion, helped by Nokia’s N-Gage gaming service which is set to reach market in coming weeks.N-Gage service will be downloaded on Nokia’s multimedia phones, with access to trial versions of many games.All major cellphone game publishers – including Electronic Arts, Gameloft and Glu Mobile – have signed up for the Nokia platform.One of the key challenges of mobile game publishers is the vast number of cellphone models – the world’s five largest cellphone makers alone bring to market several hundred new models each year.Making different versions of games for a wide-array of phones, which all have different software, can make up to half of game publishers costs.Nokia’s N-Gage will allow developers to offer a single version of a game to more than 10 million phones.The number is set to multiply in the second quarter, and also licencees of Nokia’s S60 software platform, Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, could use it in the future.
Monday, March 3, 2008
Technorati To Launch Blogger Advertising Network
Through a variety of sources we’ve confirmed that Technorati is making plans for a major shift in its going forward strategy, and is also considering a number of corporate development transactions.
First, they’ve been pitching venture capitalists on another round of financing. That’s not surprising - their last round, $10.5 million, was in June 2006. The company has raised a total of just over $20 million, and given that they have 25 employees, it’s time for another round. But we’ve also heard that they’ve hired Montgomery & Co. to shop the company to buyers, simultaneous to their funding pitches.
What’s more interesting, though is what we’re hearing on the product front. Technorati, under new CEO Richard Jalichandra, recently changed it site to focus more on its core blogging audience.
That change foreshadows the upcoming shift - which places the Technorati site itself as an anchor in a new blog advertising network.
Advertising networks are popular right now - Glam recently raised $85 million after transitioning, seemingly overnight, from a small web property focused on women to selling advertising for a variety of similarly-focused publishers. And John Battelle’s FM Publishing, an advertising network focused on technology blogs, recently hired investment bank Savvian to help them raise money or sell after turning down a $100 million buyout offer.
Technorati will certainly be competing head to head with FM, although sources say they’ll focus on the long tail of the market as well (FM only takes larger sites). The network will be a self-serve exchange for bloggers (and other publishers) as well as advertisers. Ad units will include both display and text ads, and will allow units to be charged on both a CPM and CPC basis. This self-service model looks a lot more like Adbrite than Glam or FM.
Technorati tags, which are very often used to describe blog posts with keywords selected by the author, would also be a natural way for Technorati to target advertising more effectively.
Technorati has also considered other strategies recently, including a blog rollup. But our understanding is that they’ve gone with the ad network idea, and are currently focusing engineers on finalizing the product.
Will the strategy work? As we’ve argued many times, ad networks suffer from fickle customers. Glam offers partners revenue guarantees based on page views (and lost $3.7 million last year on $21 million in revenue). FM has resisted guarantees to date, but lost high profile partner Digg last year to Microsoft. Others, including us, have simply sold advertising directly while continuing to work with FM. With Technorati entering the market, publishers will have yet more choices. That’s good for everyone except the ad networks competing for their business.
First, they’ve been pitching venture capitalists on another round of financing. That’s not surprising - their last round, $10.5 million, was in June 2006. The company has raised a total of just over $20 million, and given that they have 25 employees, it’s time for another round. But we’ve also heard that they’ve hired Montgomery & Co. to shop the company to buyers, simultaneous to their funding pitches.
What’s more interesting, though is what we’re hearing on the product front. Technorati, under new CEO Richard Jalichandra, recently changed it site to focus more on its core blogging audience.
That change foreshadows the upcoming shift - which places the Technorati site itself as an anchor in a new blog advertising network.
Advertising networks are popular right now - Glam recently raised $85 million after transitioning, seemingly overnight, from a small web property focused on women to selling advertising for a variety of similarly-focused publishers. And John Battelle’s FM Publishing, an advertising network focused on technology blogs, recently hired investment bank Savvian to help them raise money or sell after turning down a $100 million buyout offer.
Technorati will certainly be competing head to head with FM, although sources say they’ll focus on the long tail of the market as well (FM only takes larger sites). The network will be a self-serve exchange for bloggers (and other publishers) as well as advertisers. Ad units will include both display and text ads, and will allow units to be charged on both a CPM and CPC basis. This self-service model looks a lot more like Adbrite than Glam or FM.
Technorati tags, which are very often used to describe blog posts with keywords selected by the author, would also be a natural way for Technorati to target advertising more effectively.
Technorati has also considered other strategies recently, including a blog rollup. But our understanding is that they’ve gone with the ad network idea, and are currently focusing engineers on finalizing the product.
Will the strategy work? As we’ve argued many times, ad networks suffer from fickle customers. Glam offers partners revenue guarantees based on page views (and lost $3.7 million last year on $21 million in revenue). FM has resisted guarantees to date, but lost high profile partner Digg last year to Microsoft. Others, including us, have simply sold advertising directly while continuing to work with FM. With Technorati entering the market, publishers will have yet more choices. That’s good for everyone except the ad networks competing for their business.
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