Transitioning from a Developer to a Distributor of Mobile Games: Lon Otremba, CEO of Tylted (Part 4)

Sramana: What is your market reach?

Lon Otremba: We are consistently running 10 million unique players a month. That is growing rapidly. We had 8 million just three months ago. The trajectory we are on now is one that we hope will provide us with 30 million monthly players by January or February.

Sramana: How did you develop your audience of 10 million?

Lon Otremba: Initially the company approached some of the carriers and proposed making our mobile game content available to their content. We relied on other people’s distribution to expose our content to their audience in the hopes that it would lead to repeat visitors. We use that model as a starting point.

Once we started getting a regular audience, we began to think of creative ways to engage them and get them to spend money. That is when we introduced messaging, chat, and virtual currency. The third big piece was finding a way to make the economics of user acquisition work in our favor. The traditional way that many mobile game publishers used to grow audiences was to have a hot game and market their way up to the top of the charts in the app stores. They hoped they could capture users fast and get them exposed to other content that you might have.

We took an approach designed to make our entire catalog as readily available as possible, and we were able to do this because we are on the mobile web. We went out and did deals beyond the carriers. We went out and did a deal with AOL, which was looking for mobile content beyond a download store. They discovered that a good chunk of their traffic was coming to AOL via the mobile web. The figured if they could get people to play games, that would be a good thing.

We just did a deal four months ago with AOL wherein we are their exclusive mobile web game content provider. Those kind of deals have been extraordinary for us. They allow us to capture a fast-growing audience without having to buy that audience. That kind of deal does not require us to spend money up front to acquire users; instead, we can do a revenue share. We have done similar deals with other players.

The bulk of our audience is there because people have come and played our games and decided to stay. We decided to open our platform to other game developers because we felt that the best leverage we could have to grow our audience would be great content. We have a strategic vision where we want to be the place that people can find the best mobile casual-game content. We can find the very best to partner with and that is what we are doing.

Sramana: What happens in the behavior of your traffic? How do you capture the traffic and provide more content to them?

Lon Otremba: If you go to AOL, you may see an icon for one of our games. Someone who is on his or her phone will decide to play the game. That person realizes, while playing the game, that they are in the Tylted environment. When the player pauses or stops playing that game, he or she is given the opportunity to explore other games within the Tylted environment. If that user comes from AOL, we give that person credit for generating that traffic. If people come as registered customers, they can then create an avatar and buy virtual currency which they can spend on enhanced game play. Our goal in using distribution partners is to introduce people to the Tylted ecosystem via a game. That can result in high monetization opportunities for us and our partners. That is why we are building our publisher network.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Transitioning from a Developer to a Distributor of Mobile Games: Lon Otremba, CEO of Tylted
1 2 3 4 5 6 7