Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Steve Wadsworth, CEO of Tapjoy (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In your user base, how does that behavior split in those three categories? People who are legitimate free riders, people who are willing to look at advertisements, and people who are actually buying stuff.

Steve Wadsworth: It depends on many things. It depends on the publisher and how they implement the advertising proposition. At a very high level, in aggregate, maybe 4% to 5% of that user base ever purchases anything. Usually, for majority of them, it’s once. On the ad side of it, that side is growing as more and more publishers realize that the pure in-app models is not fully valuing what they’ve created. It’s increasing but I’d say 5% to 10% of people in our user base are engaging in >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Steve Wadsworth, CEO of Tapjoy (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What trends do you see in the industry’s treatment of the users that are not going to be high-monetizing users. I have one observation about the industry in general. I’m not talking about just mobile. The Internet is really saddled with an incredibly high number of free riders.

Steve Wadsworth: I think that’s totally accurate, but it’s accurate largely because of the implementation paradigm for most advertising on the web and mobile. The reason I say that is because I think the Internet has done a bit of disservice to advertising by demonstrating to people that the content is free, and around the outside, there are these annoying things that are trying to get your attention. What is lost in that is the traditional model of advertising, >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Steve Wadsworth, CEO of Tapjoy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: With that overview, can you double-click down on some of the trends in each of those vectors? Let’s take acquisitions. What are the key trends in mobile app customer acquisition right now?

Steve Wadsworth: In the early days, the focus of the publishers was to just acquire as many users as they could. They were going after volume and would think, “Let me see how many users I can get to download my app and I’ll figure out how to get value once I get the app on their phones.” It varies depending on where you are. I’m primarily talking about game publishers who are ahead of the curve in mobile app sophistication and value creation. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Steve Wadsworth, CEO of Tapjoy (Part 1)

Tapjoy is a mobile platform that helps monetize freemium apps. This discussion is an excellent overview of the dynamics of app monetization in the mobile world.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some context. Tell us who you are. Give us a bit of background and introduce us to Tapjoy.

Steve Wadsworth: I’m the President and CEO of Tapjoy. We are a leading provider of lifetime value optimization solutions for mobile app publishers. What that means is that we provide a software platform to allow mobile app publishers to maximize the value of user’s engagement in their app.

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Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: How many games have been funded on the various crowdfunding platforms?

Scott Hartsman: I wish I knew the answer but I’m afraid I don’t.

Sramana Mitra: Is it hundreds or thousands of games?

Scott Hartsman: The order of magnitude, at this point, I would say is around hundreds. I would say there are hundreds of campaigns. I do not know how many of them actually have succeeded and got funding, and from there, turned into shipped products. One risk >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve said several times that one of the organizing principles of your portfolio is that you want the business model to be fair for the customer. Can you talk about this a bit? You are coming from where the customer will subscribe into your games and you started monetizing right away. Now the world has moved to free-to-play, you don’t monetize games right away. It has a gestation period and you start monetizing later. How do you determine what is fair? How long does it take to reach the level of monetization that you were earlier monetizing at? What are the economics of the business now?

Scott Hartsman: Let me start out with the highest philosophical point. Here’s how I think of things in terms of fair and how we think about them internally as a whole. There are two ways to think about the psychology of sales in free-to-play games. Number one is when I pay for a thing, I get a thing that I genuinely value and that I’m happy for. >>>

Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When you are working with third parties who are developing the games, and you are going to publish them as part of your core business, how do you determine which ones you want to bet on?

Scott Hartsman: It’s the kind of methodology you would actually expect out of a game developer because that’s really what we are here.  I was a game developer long before I was an executive. At our core, we are a company of gamers. We love games and we love playing them. So the first thing we do is we test them out internally. ArchaAge, for instance, was in playable form before we signed it. It was more of, “Let’s rally the troops, and see if we are genuinely excited about the kind of game this is going to be. Can we see the success path?” Then we look at the developers. Are they going to have the ability to create the AAA experience that we want to ship?

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Thought Leaders in Online Gaming: Scott Hartsman, CEO of Trion Worlds (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Are there developer tools out there that a Joe Developer can afford to develop on and are high quality tools?

Scott Hartsman: Yes, these are definitely commercial-grade high-quality tools for a far smaller price point.

Sramana Mitra: How many of these are there?

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