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Posts Tagged ‘mochi-media’

Fresh off an $80 million acquisition by Shanda Games, Flash game advertising network and payments platform Mochi Media is launching a social gaming platform and a $10 million fund to invest in game developers.

Mochi Social allow developers to build social features into their games such as inviting friends, sending gifts, or posting to an activity stream. Mochi Social allows for the ability to broadcast in-game notifications to deliver news about game updates, friend activity or challenges.The aim of incorporating these features, allows for a game to transcend one social network by plugging into users social graph across all of their social media identities. The platform currently integrates with Facebook, MySpace and Twitter with more sites to be added in the near future. Currently in private beta, Mochi Social will be rolling out its first enabled game “Kingdoms at War” by A Thinking Ape next week.

A joint effort between Mochi Media and parent company Shanda Games, Mochi GAME Developer Fund is a $10 million fund that will help promising Flash and social game developers support their games through sponsorship, licensing and publishing deals. The fund will be used to assist indie Flash game development studios and game developers. Participating developers will gain access to technical, design and testing resources from Shanda Games, as well as development tools and distribution to nearly 40,000 websites from Mochi Media. Initial investments will be as much as $100,000 per game title.

It’s nice to see Mochi using its backing from Shanda to good use. And the addition of social features to Mochi’s development platform will no doubt be useful to game developers. As of June 2009 100 million people were playing games that included Mochi Media. The company also launched a payments platform for game developers last year.

Mochi Media, a Flash game advertising network and payments platform funded by Accel Partners and Shasta Ventures, has been acquired by Shanda Games for $60 million in cash and $20 million in equity. The company has raised $14 million over two venture rounds.

The deal will be announced shortly.

Shanda is China’s largest operator of online games, with nearly 10 million active accounts. The company hosts so-called MMORPGs, or massively multi-player online role-playing games, under which users pay monthly subscriber fees as well as purchase items within the game. The company went public on NASDAQ late last year and has the enviable ticker symbol GAME.

As of June 2009 100 million people were playing games that included Mochi Media. They also launched a payments platform for game developers last year.

The company was close to being acquired last year, but an internal battle between the founders and investors led to a scrapping of that deal. Shortly afterwards the hired executive team left to other ventures. And the Mochi Media founders took over management of the company again.

Shanda also acquired Goldcool Games earlier this month, a Shanghai-based online game developer and operator. Goldcool Games currently operates two MMORPGs, “Hades Realm” and “Dukes and Lords.” The company also has several MMORPGs in the pipeline, including “Dragon Heir,” “Zodiac Tales,” “Martial Glory” and “Hades Realm II.”

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Offerpal Media, the central character in the Scamville drama, is changing CEOs. Anu Shukla is no longer the CEO of the company she cofounded. Veteran executive George Garrick, most recently the CEO of Mochi Media, is now the CEO of the company.

From the press release quietly announcing the change:

Offerpal Media, the leader in virtual currency monetization for online games, virtual worlds and social networks, announced today that George Garrick has been named chief executive officer.

Garrick brings more than 25 years of experience in technology, advertising and consumer businesses to Offerpal Media. His track record of accelerating revenue growth and brokering strategic relationships with customers and partners will be critical assets in leading Offerpal Media.

I had an…interesting public exchange with Shukla last week at the Virtual Goods Summit in San Francisco (see video at end of this post). I’ve also embedded it below.

She vehemently denied that her company’s offers ever scammed users. Despite her defense of the industry, MySpace, Zynga, RockYou and others have since made significant policy changes to protect consumers from the types of offers Offerpal peddles.

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Mochi Media, a well-financed San Francisco startup that operates a decentralized network of Flash-based online games and gaming websites and offers developers a way to distribute, monetize and get statistical information about their games, sure has done a good job growing its network to a significant size since it debuted its public beta product back in October 2007.

Sometime next week, the company is going to announce that in its first month of inclusion in comScore’s measurement system, it has taken the lead over one-stop shop gaming destinations in traffic by a margin. Combined with the company’s claim that the so-called ‘extended network’ is growing its delivered impressions by 5 to 10% month-over-month, Mochi Media should be attracting over 100 million visitors on a monthly basis right about now.

Looking at worldwide traffic, comScore pegs the Mochi Media network to have received a little over 91 million unique visitors last April, or roughly 8.2 per cent of the total traffic measured in the ‘Online Gaming’ category for that month. These are impressive numbers: the second ranked online gaming destination is Spil Games, and the total amount of traffic that network receives on a global scale per month is close to that of Mochi Media Action, a subset of Mochi’s network made up of only one genre (adventure games). Familiar brands you’d expect to rank higher, such as Yahoo! Games, MSN Games, EA Online and Nickelodeon, all obtain less than half Mochi Media’s reach worldwide.

It’s worth noting, however, that most of this traffic is coming from countries outside the U.S.: from those 91+ million visitors per month worldwide, only about 16 million visitors or roughly 17% originates from the Unites States. The company tells me a lot of visitors come from other English speaking nations like Canada and the U.K. but also from China and a good number of European countries.

I also got some numbers regarding its current network size: Mochi Media currently includes more than 14,000 games played across 30,000 websites, which the company claims translates to 1 billion game plays a month worldwide. A company representative declined to share any details about its revenue - the company provides technology for game developers to integrate advertising units powered and distributed by Mochi Media - but did say sales of pre-roll video advertising units are going particularly well, with CPM rates “in the low to mid-teens” for the U.S. and the UK.

Mochi Media is backed by $14 million in venture capital from Accel Partners and Shasta Ventures. Its most recent financing round was a $10 million Series B round from both investors back in June 2008. Meanwhile, the startup has convinced both a former MySpace (Carol Werner) as a Yahoo exec (Eric Boyd) to join its ranks and spurred small startups like the recently seed-funded HeyZap to do similar things.

Keep your eyes on this one, folks.

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