Archive for July, 2010

Restore Your K-Factor with Offerpal’s SocialKast

Last month, 24 out of the top 25 social games experienced a decline in their user base, a remarkable, unprecedented and extremely telling statistic that, were it to become a trend, could spell the end of the “glory days” of social gaming.

Fortunately, there is hope. Today, Offerpal is proud to announce a new product that promises to help developers restore their lost K-Factor and once again provide the kind of sustainable growth the industry has become accustomed to.

Our new product is called SocialKast, and it’s a cross-platform user acquisition and re-engagement tool that lets developers send notifications and messages across multiple containers. At launch we’ll have Yahoo! and Google on board, with others shortly thereafter.

Offerpal’s SocialKast allows game developers and social platforms to write once in order to interact with multiple platforms using a set of lightweight REST messaging APIs and javascript calls. Developers can distribute both user-to-user and application-to-user invites, gifts, notifications and other types of text-based or graphical messages directly into the activity streams, email inboxes and other key areas of Offerpal’s partner sites.

For example, messages from a game on any platform or web site using SocialKast will be distributed through Yahoo!’s Updates API, which will make it possible for those actions to be shared by users in a variety of formats across Yahoo!. By taking advantage of the open platforms and social sites linked together by Offerpal SocialKast, developers can further extend their reach and drive viral awareness and distribution of their games.

We’re pretty excited about it, and all the feedback we’ve gotten from our alpha partners is that they think it could be a real “game changer,” to use their words. Said Jason Loia, chief operating officer of Digital Chocolate, one of the fastest-growing publishers of social games with such titles as Millionaire City and MMA Pro Fighter:

“We have long trusted Offerpal as a strategic monetization partner, and we are extremely enthusiastic about this new distribution service as well. SocialKast promises to give our viral distribution efforts an enormous boost, lower our acquisition costs, drive user engagement and retention, and access new graphs of social gamers – all with very little integration effort.”

We’ll be hosting a launch event today at noon at the Seattle Art Museum to provide more details. If you’re attending Casual Connect, we’ll hope you can swing by to hear all about it. Otherwise please email us at info@offerpal.com and we’ll be happy to answer all your questions.

An Open Letter from our CEO

As most of you probably know, Facebook has launched Facebook Credits, and certain Facebook games and applications have or will transition from their proprietary currencies to Facebook Credits.

Facebook has indicated to us that at least initially they have selected another provider to be their alt-pay partner for purchases of Facebook Credits.  We respect this decision, maintain a good working relationship with Facebook, and will do our best to facilitate the smoothest possible transition for those games which move to the Credits system.  However, this means that for the applications we currently serve which do switch to Credits, once that change happens the user traffic to those games originating from Facebook will no longer be served by Offerpal.

We will continue to fully support Facebook applications that do not switch to Credits. We will, as I mentioned, do our best to ensure the smoothest possible transition for those applications that do switch. And we will continue to serve our valued developer partners on other Internet platforms and destination sites, as well as on mobile platforms.

But like any good business, we must balance our costs with our revenues by business area.  This means that we must downsize our Facebook operations in order to adjust to an anticipated lower scale of Facebook user traffic. At the same time, we will re-focus our resources on our growth areas including other gaming platforms, open web gaming, new Internet verticals, and most importantly mobile through our Tapjoy subsidiary.

Unfortunately, as a result of this, some of the outstanding people who have worked tirelessly over the last couple of years to monetize Facebook games will have their positions at Offerpal eliminated.  I thank them for their dedication, effort and contribution, and will do whatever I can to help them find exciting new career opportunities.

Meanwhile, Offerpal is currently the largest offers and alt-pay provider worldwide.  Offerpal’s business continues to grow and expand in numerous other areas including an exciting new agreement with Yahoo!, and on the mobile iPhone, iPad and Android platforms, with more to come.  We are projecting continued strong growth going forward, as well as sustained profitability.

Finally, we would like to thank our 2,000+ developer partners for their continuing support of Offerpal and we look forward to continuing to work with all of you as we collectively grow our exciting new industry.

Sincerely,

George Garrick, CEO

Offerpal Media

Now Available: Offerpal to Monetize Social Games on the Yahoo! Application Platform

If social gaming is going to continue growing at the rate that it has been these last two years, it is invariably going to have to find new platforms on which to do it.

That’s where Yahoo! comes in, or so many of the top developers are betting.

It makes perfect sense, really: (A) Yahoo! has over 600 million unique visitors every month, (B) their Yahoo! Application Platform (Y!AP) makes it easy to build and deploy applications across their network, which (C) engages their very active, very loyal users through multiple touchpoints such as MyYahoo!, the Yahoo! Toolbar, Yahoo! Pulse and others. (D) Did we mention the 600 million users?

And now, game developers on the Yahoo! platform will also have access to Offerpal’s monetization engine, enabling them for the first time to monetize their virtual currency through alternative payment options such as offers, surveys, videos and more.

The Yahoo! Application Platform is an open application platform available globally to allow developers to unleash their applications onto the world’s most popular homepage and across the Yahoo! network. Y!AP gives you multiple options for developing apps, including JavaScript, server-side hosted, and Flash-based applications.

The Y!AP is part of the company’s Open Strategy (Y!OS), introduced in April of 2008, in which they basically rewired Yahoo! so that developers can leverage Yahoo!’s content, traffic and user base. Y!OS features a set of complementary platforms that allow developers to rapidly access Yahoo! network data and develop applications with access controlled using an open authentication standard. Aside from Y!AP, another one of these platforms is their Social API suite, which brings the power of the Yahoo! network and all its inherent social connections to the table. The API suite opens up user data, a user’s connections across a variety of experiences, user status and timely updates about user activity across a variety of Yahoo! and non-Yahoo! applications.

It is clear just by looking at the Y!OS and all of the tools they’ve made available on the Y!AP that Yahoo! is very committed to bringing the social content and information users want — including social games — to their experience on Yahoo!

It’s also clear from their recent actions and statements that the company is committed to attracting social game developers and is quite literally holding the doors open for them. As Hilary Schneider, executive vice president, Yahoo! Americas, said in a recent press announcement with Zynga, “Yahoo is focused on providing compelling, personally relevant experiences and social games are core to this experience.”

Perhaps nothing says it better, however, than this video explaining their “All Doors Are Open” policy: