Using My Offerpal to Make More Money For Your Indie Games

The benefits of My Offerpal to Make More Money From Your Indie Games

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/offerpal-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Kevin: I’m Kevin Heidel. I’m with Offerpal Media.

Interviewer: OK. And what exactly does Offerpal do?

Kevin: We run a managed offer platform for social game applications, whether it’s a social network for Facebook, MySpace, all the open social containers anywhere to stand-alone websites and as of last week on the iPhone, too. So, local platforms, too.

Interviewer: And so then you pretty much offer from advertising for MMOs. Are social games different or what?

Kevin: Really, the genre goes all across the board. We’ve been deployed absolutely everywhere so really we can touch upon anything. It’s not just with MMOs, gift and gabs, RPGs, obviously, the monsters of the world and Little Green Patch and Friends for Sale. We’ve seen huge success with those, but really we can go across all platforms.

Interviewer: Let’s say indie game developers are developing an MMO or a social game on Facebook or MySpace. How exactly would they use your program?

Kevin: Well, we are like a CPA business model, so that’s our managed offer platform.

Interviewer: What does CPA stand for?

Kevin: Cost Per Action.

Interviewer: OK.

Kevin: Everyone is also familiar with CPM2 as well, too, but then also how we integrate is very, very simple. We integrate as an I-Frame or J-soft feed [?], and we’ll just use a Facebook application as an example. You can just easily implement us. Just go to our website.

We actually have a Facebook application, also go to our stand-alone site and we’ll give you a bit of our code or API. You’ll be able to implement that and go from there. Literally, it takes a few minutes. We just check your callback URL. You guys send it back to us and if all systems are go, you can start making money in five minutes.

Interviewer: And so, pretty much the users then fill out offers that they’ll see on the page? When they fill out the offers, what exactly happens and what’s the revenue potential?

Kevin: When a user, I’ll use myself as an example, mid 20’s, go do the offers page. Actually, we’ll be targeted. We consider ourselves more of a technology platform, not just a traditional ad network. It’ll actually target the user with the appropriate offer.

I’m a big movie buff, so I’ll be accustomed to filling out a Blockbuster membership or also free surveys, too, as well. So, we do have soft offers, offers that don’t require you to actually bring out a credit card.

Interviewer: OK.

Kevin: You’ll be able to complete a survey for ‘x’ amount of virtual currency back into that application. It’s actually quite simple.

Interviewer: What kind of CPMs or results are you seeing or developers seeing?

Kevin: Traditionally, we’ve always have had this line where we’ve been saying, for every per thousand daily active users you get $75.00. Our platform has definitely improved since then. In short terms it’s definitely been changed since October or November. We’re seeing much better numbers than that. Traditionally, we’re doing between 200 and 300 on average across our platform effective CPMs. The performance is there, and it’s only getting better. For one thing, we’re always building on our platform.

As I mentioned earlier, we are a technology platform. We are reinvesting back into it all the time. We’re actually developing an optimization team that on the front end and on the back end you can go in and optimize, even further optimize the offers to the users. I myself consult, too, with Game Dynamics. I’ll work with one-on-one with the developers and we know it works. If they have a gifting app on Facebook, we’ll most likely run a very similar app with 10 other applications on that platform.

We can consult with them. We know what works, so we can make minor adjustments and kind of fit the needs of the developer in performance and what they need.

Interviewer: Can you talk about some of the game mechanics that are useful that help to generate more revenue for indie game developers in terms of either incentivizing players to fill out more offers or to actually buy more virtual coins and stuff like that?

Kevin: One with our platform, what we do is we… What I’ll typically say is about 25 to 30 percent of their banner rotations wrote the application itself. We can actually run our offers in the banners. So as the user is in the middle of the game or, maybe, on the home page of it, why should we be running the banner? We should be like, hey if you need this particular item fill out this offer for a hundred gold coins or anything like that. That’s one we’ve consulted with. It’s been great. Just that 30 percent will drive more UVs to the offers page.

In terms of game dynamics, just some basic stuff. Reinterating the fact of how much the user has left, how much virtual currency they have. On every page make sure they have 50 gold coins left, 25 gold coins left and then make sure that you also right next to that tab be like, hey need more coins? Complete offer. It’s as basic as that. A few publishers haven’t gotten to the fact of those dynamics in there, but honestly, it’s as basic as that. Just the fact that there is opportunity to engage in the app.

Actually, in the application itself I’ll use more iPhone example on the mobile side and Facebook Connect which is going to be incredible and further push the envelope of social gaming this year. Go Zenga, so what you can actually do is on the game myself you’ll be able to connect your Facebook profile to the iPhone application.

So, you’ll be at a table and that’s going to even further engage the social engagement of the application itself. You’re been on the table with someone who is playing with the iPhone, someone who is actually connected through Facebook.

Next, you can see their profile and you’ll eventually be able to input a user phone, player phone android or someone from MySpace. At the one table you’ll be able to engage between each other so opportunity is there. It really is. It’s going to be an interesting space moving forward this year.

Interviewer: Does revenue decline after a while, after you’ve gotten all your users and then they just fill out stuff? How does it develop or actually keep the revenue flowing, like month after month after month?

Kevin: Well, where we come into assist with that our network isn’t just 10 offers. We have thousands and thousands of offers in our ad network, and so we are targeting users. Obviously, me coming in as a mid 20’s I’m going to ax out a couple thousand offers that we do have, just kind of stream it down a little bit.

Interviewer: Sure.

Kevin: If that user actually does complete our offers, isn’t that great? Right? That’s what we want them to do, but we keep it fresh. We’re always building on our network. We also monetize international traffic well, too. So, we always have that opportunity, too, as well.

Moving forward, I know we actually discussed prior to this is localization.

Interviewer: Yeah.

Kevin: Say a user in Brazil in the next couple of weeks, two or three weeks, we’ll be able to localize offers to their language. So, she’ll be able to go and see Portuguese offers, like all offers in Portuguese. Also, we’re going to be able to target them. GOIP target users, Brazilian offers, too, as well. Those that are consumer offers that are appropriate to the area in Rio, we’ll be able to target them.

Interviewer: How important is localization in terms of helping an indie developer actually make their game generate more revenue or also just expand their game? Isn’t English enough for most?

Kevin: Honestly, it’s absolutely huge. I’m a huge proponent of it. At this point in time our network has been based around U. S. users. Obviously, that’s where we originate over here.

Interviewer: Sure.

Kevin: In the Bay area and we’ve monetized traffic well on MySpace primarily U. S. and Facebook, but moving forward these networks are saturated with a lot of applications and it’s stiff competition to get out there and compete for these users. Obviously, driving those users that are willing to go to the offers page and fill out offers and help you monetize your apps.

So, moving forward, developers should definitely look into working with these. Just pitch it. Open social is great. Who better to have on your side than Google. Work with them and deploy across all their containers. You have Hi-Fi. You have Orchid. You have MySpace. I know that there’s dev teams out there actively building relationships.

What’s going to be required is that those users within the social networks are not going to be U. S. users. They’re going to be Russlian. They’re going to be Brazilian or UK users, Australian. They’re going to be all over the board. You’re going to have to localize.

Again, it’s definitely important for us to be able to offer that to you guys, so again for indie users or indie developers to be able to monetize is they’re going to have to localize. That’s it.

Interviewer: So, there are indie developers or game developers that are actually making thousands every day off of this. Is this even possible or what?

Kevin: There’s even quite a few guys that I work with, even young developers that are making a couple thousand dollars a day by just monetizing with us. They might only have one or two applications, and they grew virally on either Facebook or MySpace or Orchid or whatever and it took off. We work closely with them, too.

A great way, I know you actually mentioned this earlier and I never fully answered it, is the life cycle of the application itself. They will die if you don’t keep the application engaging for the users there’s no point for them to come back. You can go out there and obviously grow virally and having a lot of users is great, it’s socially engaging but at the same time there’s other opportunities as well. You’ve got to focus on them to be able to do it.

Interviewer: Do you know of any opportunities or suggestions on ways to extend a life cycle of an application or game?

Kevin: Yeah, of course. So, one way to do it is on something as basic as the product in your app every two to four to six weeks, if you have a gift and gab or if you have anything you can add to, a limited edition item within the application itself. That right there, you’ll see a huge spike in the UVC offers page. You’ll see, maybe, you’ll have a gifting Valentine’s Day application and you want to be able to send your love to your friends. There’s apt to be a great spiker, the application for a Valentine’s Day gift. It’s just as simple as that.

You just want to keep it as engaging and fresh as possible because again, as I mentioned, these social networks are saturated. Building a gift and gab? There’s a hundred out there and they are all competing for the same users. Anything you can do to keep it fresh is incredibly valuable.

Interviewer: If an indie developer is interested in finding out more or signing up for this program, how do they do that?

Kevin: As I said earlier, it’s incredibly simple to integrate Offerpal. You can just go to our website: Offerpal media, Google searches, whatever. We’re all across the board.

Interviewer: Is that Offerpalmedia as one word or is it Offerpal media?

Kevin: It’s OfferpalMedia. It’s offerpal.com. Just go to that. We have a place to sign up for it. We release that every two to three weeks with updates on what is going on in the space, kind of development, new improvements on our product, what to look for, even the next coming quarter, even the end of this year. We kind of release that every couple of weeks.

Again, if you go to our site there’s tons of information. You’ll be able to see. We do work with Little Green Patch, Friends for Sale. Don’t just see examples. Other successful publishers we’ve worked with. All of the information is available to you.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.

Kevin: Thanks.