MoPub recently published its quarterly Mobile Advertising Marketplace Report for Q1 2013, which, combined with other such reports from mobile advertising operators, reveals three interesting, emerging trends in mobile advertising. Advertising placements are getting bigger The performance of larger ad sizes (480×320, 769×1024, and 1024×768) experienced a marked increase in Q1 2013, creating a wide [...]
The performance of Zynga’s stock in the almost two years since its IPO has chilled public markets ambitions for gaming companies. But two Western gaming developers, both of which have capably navigated a transition from Facebook (and other web-based platforms) to mobile, currently contend for the distinction of most likely to undertake the first post-Zynga [...]
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 [...]
That app discovery is broken isn’t in dispute within the mobile industry. The lack of adequate alternatives to native app store search has catalyzed the existence of a vast secondary market for mobile users; that market has become so competitive that studios without sizable balance sheets are precluded from participating in it. Industry giants are [...]
It should be obvious to anyone operating in the mobile space that app discovery is ripe for disruption: slide four from MoPub’s recent 4th Quarter Mobile Advertising Marketplace Report illustrates how rapidly eCPMs are rising on both iOS and Android (the entire report is worth reading).
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.
It’s interesting to see the debate around mobile vs. web first erupt again for the consumer web (see here and here), as this topic was mostly put to bed in gaming about a year ago when the largest developers transitioned from Facebook to mobile. Zynga appears to be the last holdout on that front, as even Wooga is [...]
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.
Whenever a recruiter reaches out to me about a job opening that I’ll decline, I encourage them to use me as a resource in the future if they need information about the nascent fields of analytics, big data, and quantitative marketing for games. As a result, I am asked — infrequently, but often enough to [...]
