Aiming to Dominate Real Estate Brokerage: Robert Reffkin, CEO of Urban Compass (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get it off the ground? Was Ori someone you knew or did you meet him after you decided to do this project?

Robert Reffkin: I met Ori when I was working in the White House. I was an advisor on the company that he sold to Twitter. A year after selling, we got together and thought about doing something together? We sat down and said, “Where can we bring technology to a space that didn’t have it?”

Sramana Mitra: Ori was part of the selection process of what problem you were going to focus on?

Robert Reffkin: Absolutely. We’re co-founders.
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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Steve Wadsworth, CEO of Tapjoy (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t agree with that at all. We cover e-commerce extensively. I think there’s going to be tons of new brands being built. It’s like how retail and specialty retail have evolved for decades and decades. There are always new brands and user experiences. I think e-commerce will continue to build interesting businesses and there will be new brands and businesses being built. Your point though is true that people who were interacting more through web channels are going to move to mobile devices, that’s correct. But I think the statement that you made about there not being as many opportunities for businesses being built, I don’t agree with that.

Steve Wadsworth: I don’t disagree with anything you just said. I’d be crazy to imply that there’s not opportunity. There’s always opportunities for new businesses particularly when there’s a shift in the paradigm to something like mobile. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Steve Wadsworth, CEO of Tapjoy (Part 6)

Steve Wadsworth: There are two reasons why some of the other apps may not get the same level of traction. One is user interest. Games are universal. You get much more user engagement there. Secondly, I think a number of app publishers are leaving money on the table because of the model they’ve chosen. Let us look at the magazine business. Historically, their offline model has been advertising and subscriptions. They’ve moved online and to mobile with the same model. While subscriptions is a form of freemium model for monetization, it’s a highly limited model because you’re asking the user to make a very large decision. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Steve Wadsworth, CEO of Tapjoy (Part 5)

Steve Wadsworth: What our analytics is able to do is watch the user behavior in the app, and based on that behavior assess very quickly which bucket a user falls into. We then use predictive analytics to classify users. We also have engagement tools in that same solution that will provide the publisher the opportunity to further engage any given segment and drive them to monetization either through advertising or in-app purchase. That’s where this ends up going. It’s sophisticated but the freemium model requires that as each user is going to behave slightly differently. You need a sophisticated modeling and analytics capability to understand the behavior of your users, put them >>>

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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