While CEO of Electronic Arts, John Riccitiello steps down at his post from the legacy game publisher, today NativeX is launching a new end-to-end solution for developers for native advertising on mobile games and other mobile apps. Trip Hawkins, EA and Digital Chocolate founder, will be an advisor to the Board of Directors (BOD).
“Native advertising is the future, and I am thrilled to get involved with this forward-thinking company,” said NativeX advisor Trip Hawkins. “Every major publisher on mobile and web has their eye on native advertising right now. NativeX is proving that we as an industry can do better than banner ads.”
The platform launch follows on the heels of an explosive year in mobile for the company. At 105 million monthly active users across iOS and Android, NativeXs' mobile business grew 350 percent in the last year. NativeX also recently opened a San Francisco office and expanded its employee headcount to 165.
“Our goal is to provide the innovation and the creativity to ensure consumers gets their favorite apps for free,” said Rob Weber, co-founder and senior vice president of NativeX. “We want to help developers thrive through the success of their apps.
It is no surprise that the game industry is going native. With the major players in platform production, Google and Apple’s duopoly runs parallel with the growth of game creation; it begs the solution for a friendly face to design directed at audience deployment.
“The booming handset industry is underpinned by the Google / Apple duopoly in mobile platforms; a duopoly that, in turn sustains the handset maker duopoly of Apple and Samsung. With a combined smartphone market share of 46%, Samsung and Apple account for nearly all handset industry profit – in Q3 2012 Apple and Samsung took 60% and 38%, respectively of all profits across the top-8 handset OEMs.” - VisionMobile, Developer Economics Report, January 2013
Synced in a similar scenario the editorial and publication industry is in a boondoggle. Mitch Joel, the author of “Six Pixels of Separation” remarks on the new ideology of native advertising. In his recent blog for the Harvard Blog Network, he remarks that there is truly no definition of a new ad metric and standards but a long view that this industry needs to address the ever-changing market of content and audience acquisition. While debate is ensued among industry insiders, The IAB Annual Leadership Meeting is deeply divided on the how-to. Buzzfeed is disrupting old media values with its new native environment. It is not a surprise to me that yesterday; Buzzfeed's main ad business is helping advertisers create content that looks and feels like Buzzfeed editorial content and runs on Buzzfeed.com. Part of Buzzfeed's sell to advertisers is that its audience has a propensity to share Buzzfeed content around social networks, giving advertisers additional distribution for free– known in the ad industry as "earned media."
Earned media is not a new concept for Trip Hawkins or Rob Weber. Capitalizing on the player participation in a gaming market is part of in-game advertising. Big brand participation and advertising media metrics has to be ready for this x-factor in audience acquisition. Game developers and designers may be the industry where all go down that path.
NativeX will also be present at the 2013 Game Developers Conference. NativeX is hosting a panel on native advertising and generating game revenue at GDC 2013 with Trip Hawkins and Ben Vu of SkyVu.
About NativeX:
Formerly W3i, NativeX is a leader in innovative monetization and user acquisition solutions for mobile and web apps. For publishers and developers who want to monetize with advertising that really works, NativeX is the marketing technology platform that is reinventing in-app advertising to create more effective and engaging ad experiences that enable developers to build successful businesses around their apps. Native advertising becomes part of the user experience and it out-performs standard display advertising by 150 percent, often doubling or tripling revenue for publisher partners. For more information, visit nativex.com.
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