Last week I participated in a panel at Casual Connect called “Emerging Strategies to User Acquisition”. I was honored to share the stage with Jussi Laakkonen from Applifier, Stefan Bielau, Erlend Christoffersen from Supercell, Gilad Rotem from InGaming, and Billy Shipp from Iddiction. Below you’ll find a video of the entire panel, which clocks in at [...]
I wrote a few weeks ago about the importance of tracking a basic portfolio of metrics that I called Minimum Viable Metrics. I argued that this is especially important on mobile, where product iterations are necessarily less frequent than on the web because of platform idiosyncrasies. My point was that any iteration containing more than one [...]
One innovation the freemium model brings to bear is analytics as a fundamental component of the product development lifecycle: since distribution (and thus customer adoption costs) are 0, behavioral customer data is available with enough volume to develop new streams of revenue from it. The freemium model accords an analytics team the opportunity to conceptualize [...]
(Dashboard template can be found here; source code on GitHub here) In freemium mobile, my experience has been that the principles of the Minimum Viable Product as a product strategy are respected but sometimes necessarily abandoned because the concept isn’t perfectly transferable to mobile platforms. The MVP approach was designed for a platform (the web) that allows [...]
Today I gave a presentation called “Big Data in Mobile Gaming: Optimizing the User Experience” at IGExpo in Tallinn, Estonia. The aim of the presentation was to provide a general overview of how an analytics system can (should?) inform the development process, with some attention paid to defining various metrics and the process of data-driven [...]
In a past professional life, I wrote algorithms on a commodity trading desk for an institutional investment fund. And over the past year, I’ve come to recognize the market for mobile users (which I call the secondary market for mobile users, or SMMU) as being fundamentally similar to that of other commodity spot markets, on [...]
2012 was an encouraging year for the mobile gaming industry: total revenues swelled to $4.5 billion, the number of iOS devices ever sold reached approximately half a billion, and two studios proved that the free-to-play business model is not only sound, but that it can generate absurd amounts of money.
Part One As I mentioned in the first post on this topic, a marketing manager knows only a few things about a user acquired from a mobile user acquisition network; one of those things is that the user was put up for sale.
Part Two When a marketing manager buys a user from a mobile ad network, he knows exactly three things about his purchase: The purchased user has a mobile phone and has installed at least one app; The user’s mobile phone model and geographic location; The developer of the app from which that user came was willing [...]
Part 1: MBAs shouldn’t do data analysis In Part 1 of this series, I argued that a centrally-hosted analytics system built on d3.js is superior to a Tableau-based (or some other proprietary tool — I use Tableau in the example because it’s probably the most prominent in the gaming industry) system because it allows for [...]
