Continuing its reinvention from a monetisation outfit to an industry power player, Tapjoy is now highlighting its position as what it calls 'one of the largest international publishers of mobile gaming apps'.

The reason behind this is its $5 million Android Fund, which has seen 130 games ported to the OS.

Distribution muscle

Of course, Tapjoy isn't the IP owner of these games and apps, but it points to its network power in terms of the 25 million monthly active users those games had in December. This is up from around 171,000 MAUs in January 2011.

Top games on its network includes MachineWorks Northwest's Duke Nukem and 3D Hunting: Alaskan Hunt, which has more than 1 million total users. Craneballs Studios' Overkill has more than 900,000 users, and Making Fun's Santa's Village, which has 680,000 users.

"Our goal for the Tapjoy Android Fund was to help enhance the Android ecosystem by bringing great games from Facebook, iOS and other platforms to the Android Market," said Rob Carroll, Tapjoy's director of publishing.

"Our fund is unique in that we don't ask for creative control and we don't push developers to adopt one strategy over another; we simply identify talented teams and arm them with the tools and resources they need to quickly build their apps and then turn them into top hits."

Free for all

When using the fund, developers gain access to Tapjoy's performance-based ad network and can hook into its virtual currency monetisation engine, game state server for virtual economy management, mobile analytics platform and other value-added services including targeted app recommendations

"Our games were already very successful on iOS, but with Tapjoy's help we were able to quickly and easily port them to Android and grow our user base more rapidly than we ever expected," said Ben Vu, SkyVu's CEO.

"Tapjoy offered sound advice and direction as we built Battle Bears for Android, but at the same time they let us do our own thing. The end result was a user experience that might just be our most intense yet, and it has paid off handsomely in terms of user growth, engagement and, perhaps most importantly, revenue."

The Android Fund is still open. You can find out more here.