Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Steve Wadsworth, CEO of Tapjoy (Part 1)

Tapjoy is a mobile platform that helps monetize freemium apps. This discussion is an excellent overview of the dynamics of app monetization in the mobile world.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some context. Tell us who you are. Give us a bit of background and introduce us to Tapjoy.

Steve Wadsworth: I’m the President and CEO of Tapjoy. We are a leading provider of lifetime value optimization solutions for mobile app publishers. What that means is that we provide a software platform to allow mobile app publishers to maximize the value of user’s engagement in their app.

Sramana Mitra: Given that positioning, perhaps we can take a few use cases and illustrate what are the different types of activities that your customers are doing on your platform to get more of a visceral feeling for the product.

Steve Wardsworth: I’ll start with where it all began and that’s acquiring users to a mobile app. Tapjoy was one of the first solution providers that a publisher who’s launching a new app would go to effectively acquire users in the marketplace. The next role that we play is in the analytics that support understanding that user’s behavior in an app so that the publisher can optimize what they put in front of that user in terms of message, promotion, or re-engagement. The third piece is monetization, which is how you maximize the user’s value by monetizing their behavior and activity in your app. That could be through either in-app purchases or advertising. I’ll tell you a little bit about how we evolved to those three pieces.

Tapjoy, when it was originally formed, was formed as sort of an advertising platform for mobile app distribution and monetization. A mobile app publisher would integrate it and that would allow them to put ads in their apps for other apps that a user might be interested in. That helps drive user acquisition for publishers and monetization for the publishers who are putting those ads in their apps.

Today, that original Tapjoy platform has grown and evolved into a full ad tech suite for mobile app publishers to maximize value through advertising in a mobile app, with a primary focus on freemium apps. We recently acquired a company called 5Rocks that has a very robust analytics offering for mobile apps to help optimize a user’s engagement in an app and help monetize them through in-app purchases. It combines the capabilities of those two platforms into one platform to optimize lifetime value of any given user in any freemium app.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Steve Wadsworth, CEO of Tapjoy
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