Nought to 55 million in 12 months
Tuomas Rinta tells us how Applifier built an empire
There's no upper limit. Of course there are situations where games are of different size. We have games that have millions of monthly active users, then we have games that have 5000. Of course there's a balance in that a lot of clicks come and go to the big games. The smaller games, every now and then they send clicks and it takes, like, two seconds to get their clicks back. If there are big games that send out a lot of traffic, it means that it sometimes takes a while to get their clicks back.
The network is so large that it helps this problem. There isn't a great unbalance. When Applifier started, this was a problem. There were 20-30 developers. Introduce a bigger player into that equation and the network stops: all of the traffic flows in one direction. After a while, it balances itself, because the network is large enough. With the hundreds of publishers, it's no longer a problem.
We couldn't even handle Zynga, because they'd tip the network off balance.
Of course, there are those that sometimes send out more traffic than we can send back, but then we have different ways of fixing this problem by running larger ads or promoting them on on Facebook application. But again, this is why we couldn't even handle Zynga, because they'd tip the network off balance. It's one of the reasons we've been successful with the smaller guys, making a large network out of small pieces works well.
And after that stage, we've been able to introduce the larger players as well, without any problems.
We have a family friendly setting we can turn on, but it's not really used. We've had one or two enquiries about it - we pre-approve a set of games, and if somebody asks about it we can turn it on, but it's not really used. There aren't that many games that are harsh enough.
What we do provide, and what's asked for a lot, is the prohibition of games that are in the same genre as their own game. Especially, there are a lot of casino slot games on Facebook, and those don't want to advertise each other. They're happy to advertise other genres, but not games in the same genre. So we allow that to be blocked.
Other than that, we usually say, if you want to filter too many other categories out then in the long run you may actually be doing yourself damage. If people can't find anything fun to click on then you won't get any traffic back.
Sports games. People who play sports games are interested in playing other sports games, other than that we've noticed that there's really no correlation in trying to match genres. There are certain trends. People who play, for example, one of the big games on Facebook; Baking Life, people who play that tend not to play other similar games. They look for games in other genres. Other than that... we've done testing in these areas, we noticed that the changes are pretty meaningless.
People can try games, and how much they end up playing them, or if they ditch the original game, depends on so many factors outside of our control. The sports games are a category where we've noticed that if we advertise games from a similar category, there's a pretty high chance that people will end up playing them as well.
We've seen a great influx of Fantasy Football type applications, especially those licensed from the US, from the NFL or NBA, these are increasingly popular. We've seen a lot of traffic between these applications.
Well what we've been talking about a lot is that publishers have this fear where they feel that they send out good users and they get bad users back. I was actually talking to one of our bigger publishers at Casual Connect in Hamburg and he said exactly that. When they first started using they were afraid that they'd be sending out good users and get users back that don't retain or monetise. They measured, and what they realised was that the level of the users was pretty much exactly the same or better than the users they were sending out, on average.
So of course it's a rational fear for the publisher, but what we've noticed is that the traffic level retains pretty well on average. Retention between games is actually something that we measure constantly. What we do is to look at the traffic from game A to game B and see how well it retains compared to other traffic coming in. Then we know if we should send people from game A to game B or not.