Randy Barenscott is VP for ZPLAY's YUMIMOBI advertising platform, and is presently based in their Beijing, China, HQ office.
With the 'new normal' of the global economy providing additional opportunities, the mobile game publisher, as uniquely defined in the Chinese market, has played a key role.
Like a bridge, they have connected the CP (Content Provider) and SP (Service Provider) together, providing operating and marketing services for mobile game products, and have served well to prolong the product life cycle and enhance profitability. That was the beginning.
ZPLAY's own approach to the global publishing system, has been not only to help the CP to operate and market games, but also to directly shoulder and support smaller teams as they expand and build a healthy and prosperous developer organization.
Here are a few of our key lessons along the way.
Build your reputation
ZPLAY Founder and CEO, Jack Ho, who has been in the mobile game and internet industry for nearly 10 years, has witnessed so much success and failure.
He well knows that in any mature, free market, any company without a good reputation is doomed to certain destruction.
Jack has always stressed the importance on building a strong and positive brand.
In fact, at the product level, positive public reviews, for example, have become as important as the product quality itself.
Therefore, since the very beginning, Jack has always stressed the importance on building a strong and positive brand for ZPLAY, emphasizing ourselves as a trusted publisher with global capabilities.
The result has been that ZPLAY has been able to build and expand, and has seen its products well referred and downloaded more than 400 million times all over the world.
On the back of this promising start, we are now active in the international markets more than ever, ready to become a larger and larger Eastern rooted voice in the global mobile game space.
"People seem to like us and our products" says Ho. "It is a blessing that we work very hard to build on."
Quality speaks volumes
Since ZPLAY's founding in 2010, it has published over 100 casual mobile games.
Every success of ours starts with a quality game.
These games have fortunately seen top rankings in both App Store and Google Play, and on a fairly consistent basis.
They were also happily received as App Store recommendations many times.
This has been key to some of our growth, as casual play games cannot often justify paid user acquisition as a core growth strategy, although that is generally very popular in the mobile game and app space. We often need to be more innovative with our marketing, but every success of ours starts with a quality game.
PopStar!, one of our most successful games, has been a total hit with users and critics alike. The principal is a simple elimination game, but it is executed really well, and of course is a little addictive to play.
On any given day, well more than 10 million people actively play it.
It, again, all starts with game quality! In 2016, we have about 40 great new titles planned for release, but some of the early successes include BB-TAN, as featured in App Store for almost a week, as well as Zombie Tsunami.
The next big games from ZPLAY will be coming out soon, including Mr. Jump, Inner Circle and more. Stay tuned!
Innovate or Die
ZPLAY has grown very fast, and has even bigger plans for the future. Here are details on the latest product now available to the market.
- YUMIMOBI
As many ZPLAY games are ad supported, it would only make sense (and dollars too!) that we would be motivated to build our own ad technology. Hence, YUMIMOBI, our own proprietary ad monetization platform and ad exchange.
It already serves more than 10 billion ads per month within our own games, and has outperformed any other third party monetization service that we have tried.
And for those that like to hear the acronyms, we have a SSP, ADX, DSP, DMP, and PMP, or basically the full stack of robust ad technology, connected worldwide and working hard every day to deliver the highest overall revenue to us, and our developer/publisher partners.
Yes, I said "partners", as sharing is caring, right?!
We see ourselves as more of a boutique player.
As a key part of this, our tech is connected to, and mediates between, well more than 100 of the top ad networks, DSPs, ad exchanges and direct buyers. That is why it works so well. Smart algorithms help too!
As we are surely not the first or only provider of this kind of tech, people might want to know what our differentiators are.
Yes, we have free ad network mediation, can mediate between ad types, can enrich impressions with DMP data, fine tune revenue performance automatically, have a great UI with transparent and insightful reporting, and can likely do as much as anyone else does in real-time.
As Ho recently clarified:
"We see ourselves as more of a boutique player. This means that we tailor our solution for each individual developer/publisher partner, and we are surely more of a full service outfit than most any of our competitors might be.
"On top of this, no comparable monetization solution that we know of, can likely deliver better eCPMs and fill in China/Asia than we can. This is key, as the tier 1 markets are pretty mature, and it is so not hard to perform well and find 100% fill there.
"In these ways, we probably offer much more for the small to medium-sized developer/publisher, all in a hassle-free, comprehensive solution that's great revenue performance speaks for itself."
Find out more at www.zplay.com and www.yumimobi.com.
