Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: advertising (Page 1 of 3)

DoApp Has Been Acquired by Newscycle Solutions

DoApp logoDoApp has gone and done it — and, yes, it’s cool.

The highly successful Minnesota mobile startup has been acquired by Newscycle Solutions, a 500-employee Bloomington MN-based firm that “develops and delivers software technology to empower the global news media industry.” DoApp has developed more than 1,500 mobile apps for the news publishing and broadcast industries.  All DoApp employees will join Newscycle. The acquisition closed on June 10, 2016; the price was not announced.

DoApp was founded in early 2008 by former Google employee Joe Sriver and a small team. It has been entirely self-funded and profitable for six years. Newscycle Solutions is made up four merged companies and is owned by Vista Equity Partners, based in San Francisco, which was the most active firm in the M&A business last year. (Within the past two weeks alone, it acquired Marketo and Ping Identity, deals valued collectively at $2.4 billion.) Continue reading

Minnesota’s W3i Lights Up the ‘Net with Its Latest App News

(This post first appeared on Minnov8.com, a site about web & Internet innovation in MInnesota.)

Okay, so there’s this company named Apple that I hear makes phones. And people tell me there’s been, uh, a bit of news lately about some new phone of theirs? 
IPhone4-FrontBackSide
Well, that media firestorm didn’t stop Minnesota’s W3i from deciding to jump in with some news of its own, which is actually related to the exploding ecosystem around Apple mobile devices.  That would be apps.

St. Cloud, MN-based W3i is in the app distribution business — in a big, profitable way (33 successive quarters thereof).  But till now that business has been all about desktop apps, and Windows only. Well, mark down yesterday as the day they entered the world of mobile, with this bombshell: W3i Launches New Incented Mobile App Distribution Service for iOS App Developers.  A separate version of the release, for consumers, gets more to the benefit: Consumers Can Now Earn Rewards for Installing Apps.  Those rewards, my friends, would be cash — for consumers who register at a W3i site called Apperang.com

Naturally, app fanboys and girls everywhere loved the news — after reading about it on some of the sites they frequent the most.  TechCrunch (MobileCrunch) ran this story: Apperang Pays You Cash to Download iPhone Apps… Ka-Ching!  And VentureBeat (MobileBeat) ran concurrently — amazing how that happens — with their take: Get paid to install apps with W3i Mobile Solutions and Apperang
W3i-logo+tag Numerous other sites and blogs picked up on it immediately, and Twitter was going crazy on it (just search on hashtags #apperang and #w3i).  [Oh, sure, there was a story in the Mpls StarTrib last week, too, but that didn't light up much of anything… <rimshot>]

Apperang-screenclip I asked the CEO of a local app development company for his reaction to this W3i news, from a business perspective:  ”The model and integration W3i has developed for desktop distribution has been a huge success in the past, so I wouldn’t bet against them on making their mobile version a success,” said Wade Beavers, CEO of DoApp Inc. “For developers wanting to get a core base of users fast, it makes sense to use this service. The key will be how long those users keep your app, because that’s where the return on investment is.”

I also asked one of Minnesota’s most experienced iPhone app developers for his reaction: “Will app publishers readily jump to use this type of service? Small developers, maybe,” said Bill Heyman of CodeMorphic. “But small developers may not have budget to support this type of promotion… Will it be enough to hit the tipping point for more organic sales because of a higher App Store ranking? Well, ultimately, it would depend on how much a company wants to spend to buy a ranking.”

But, actually, W3i signed on some pretty successful big developers for its private beta before the announcement yesterday (the service is now in public beta).  That list of launch advertisers — just those that let W3i use their names for PR purposes — includes these firms, with the name of their app in parentheses: Big Stack Studios (Sigma), Inert Soap (FingerZilla), Booyah (MyTown), Gist (Gist), Thinking Ape (Kingdoms at War), Flixster (Movies), Slacker Inc (Slacker Radio), xCube Labs (My Health Records – Health n Family), and infinidycorp (Zombies vs. Aliens).

I’m sure we’ll be hearing about a lot more, as W3i tells me they are crazy-busy now following up with other app companies who are inquiring.

(Disclosure: the author has had a consulting relationship with W3i for providing PR services.)

Widget Summit, Day 1: Advertising & Widgets

[Okay, it’s actually Day 2 now, and I’m sitting in the main hall getting ready for today’s sessions to get rolling.  But I still have posts to do about Day 1! So, please bear with me (bad wi-fi in my hotel, you know….in SF??), while I keep playing catch up…]

"Monetization" is what this panel is about, said Saar Gur, a partner with Charles River Ventures. He introduced Lance Tokuda, the CEO of RockYou, to kick things off — and Lance was happy to brag up his business to no end for us. "We offer 40 widgets…one of every four online users has one…and we’re number-one in engagement," he said. A very key point that Tokuda made is that networks with an API give your widgets "seven times the distribution."  Widgetadvpanel
That’s Facebook now, of course, "but more are coming soon." He said that RockYou is "the largest CPI widget ad network."  What’s CPI, you ask?  Cost per install. "Widget distribution is hard," said the RockYou CEO. "Only 1% succeed."  But, he wanted to make sure we all understood that "third-party ad networks enable better distribution" — specifically, he said their experience is 30 to 100 times better with ad support.

Doubleclick’s VP of rich media, Ari Paparo, says his firm is "enabling widget advertising." They’re helping advertisers take campaigns viral by putting elements like an "Ad to Google" or "Share" button in their ads. "We offer 100 different custom metrics per widget — the advertisers are demanding these."

Doubleclickwhy
Peanut Labs CEO, Murtaza Hussain, said his firm "helps widget companies monetize through market research."  With a Facebook app they designed, they allow people to earn money by taking surveys. They have 120 research clients, and an industry-leading 29% response rate.

Moderator Gur jumped back in to mention some other ways that people are looking at monetizing: "affiliate links, the iLike model, and using virtual currency." Then he popped  a good question to the panel: "How much are all widget companies now generating, in total, in the way of revenues?"  Are you ready for the answer to this one? "Maybe $1 million per month," said RockYou’s Tokuda, causing a collective yet silent gasp to go up from the crowd. "Those who try to get installs by themselves fail," he said. In the next breath, he said it works much better, of course, to get a firm like his to advertise for you, to get those installs.  The moderator pointed out that, when we talk monetization of widgets, the majority of revenues is very definitely now coming from advertising.  What were some ideas for future monetization, he asked?  Peanut Labs: "Premium models." Doubleclick: "It may sound boring, but commerce." RockYou: "Delivering games into social networks."

Next question: "Who are the first-mover types of advertisers in this space, and are they more brand focused or direct response?"  Doubleclickroadmap
Doubleclick’s Paparo jumped in: "Definitely brand advertisers," he said. "And we see the first-movers especially in the theatrical (movies) and auto categories."  Peanut Labs’ Hussain: "Any advertiser looking to understand the Gen Y demographic." He said his firm asks 16 demographic and psychographic questions of its survey respondents.

The moderator then asked: "What kinds of packages are you selling, with what metrics?" RockYou: "Most just want to know the clickthrough to their site — Dell, for example. We’re also seeing a preference for Facebook buys."  When asked what the going rate was for an install, Tokuda said anywhere from 50 cents to $1.00 is the CPI rate for RockYou. He said a blogger his company follows recently reported that RockYou is getting double what others are charging, which he obviously takes great pride in.

"Before a widget maker launches, what advice would you give him or her?" moderator Gur asked. Peanut Labs: "Do market research!" He also would advise looking at virtual currencies, "which are strong." Doublclick would recommend using just standard ad units. "Collecting demographic data is over-rated." RockYou said to get your page views maximized, and that the demographic of young girls is a great way to do that.  "How do you scale?" the moderator followed up.  "You’ll start with an ad network, then eventually go to a direct model," said Doubleclick. And what do you need to support ad sales?  "You’d need an ad server of your own. But you’re probably not going to go direct for a while.  I mean, if annual revenues in the whole widget industry is only $12 million right now, then it could only support 10 sales people!"  The moderator switched gears: "As your widget develops, what’s a good time to start advertising?" RockYou: "I’d say maybe one million impressions per day." At that point, he said, it could make you $1000 a day." Speaking of sales people, Peanut Labs said it’s stopped accepting more publishers because it doesn’t have the sales people to support them.

In the panel followup and audience Q&A session, moderator Saar Gur said he thinks the real business models for widgets are still three to five years out. Doubleclick’s Paparo offered up some more insight into the current advertising picture. "It’s no secret that banner ads on Facebook aren’t selling well right now," he said. "The successes of banner ads on social networks in general are fairly spotty."  But perhaps the most interesting comment he made was this last one:  "Ads can’t be widgets — they’re different things. That’s how a lot of the brands I’m talking to are thinking."

Widget Summit, Day 1: Max Levchin Speaks

The well-known founder of widget leader Slide (and formerly a cofounder and CTO of PayPal), Max Levchin is the closest thing there is today to a rockstar in the nascent world of widgets. Slide had 134M uniques in June according to comScore. P1030545
He noted that Slide has three of the top four apps on Facebook: TopFriends, FunWall, and SuperPoke.  Gee, check out all the things you can do to your friends on that last one!  Max said Slide is now working a lot on monetization, and doing well (movie promos, etc). Most people would agree that Slide seems to be mostly about "MySpacing" Facebook. But, that may not be a bad thing — because, with its numbers, it’s likely to be the widget company that most quickly figures out how to make money in this game, working with the advertisers that will be the main route to that $$ –and they already are very much talking to them, running lots of trial campaigns to prove their worth.  Other than that, I didn’t understand a whole lot of what Max said….he talks really, really fast.P1030546

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