Money does not grow on trees when it comes to smartphone game development,” said Ben Moore from Mighty Rabbit Studios. “Too often, people hear the success stories and imagine that any somewhat visible game on market is generating great amounts of cash flow. This simply is not the case. Roughly one out of eight games make it into any kind of a feature spot long enough to generate the coverage needed to sell enough copies to make money. That’s why publishers have been stepping into the arena to formalize a process to getting into that coveted feature spot. If you have a publisher, they typically take between 20-50 percent of revenue after Apple takes 30 percent. So even with a big, successful title, a lot of developers only see 35-50 percent of what the game actually earns.
Since the days of, well, the gold rush, every new industry has seen stories of a few massive successes fuel the dreams of exponentially more also-rans, causing an industry to mature.
Developers, looking forward, how do you plan to make your money back?
Source: industrygamers.com
Har Har Har. That’s the kind of bold headline writing that could get you a job at the New York Post.
Incidentally, my favorite NY Post front page headline from when I lived in NY was the day that Osama Bin Laden had just released a new video. His beard was darker than it had been in previous videos, and the NY Post sized on that with the headline”
Osama Bin Laden dyes his beard as dark as his cold, black heart.
Golf Clap.
Although I get this feeling a lot as well.
Source: mattgemmell.com
The Oatmeal made an unintentional point that was just as important as the first, however: The single least-attractive attribute of many of the people who download content illegally is their smug sense of entitlement.
Moneyball Comes to Publishing
Sabermetrics!
I hope that this not only improves publisher incomes, but leads to a better viewing experience for sites that rely on advertising. If they can make more money with less banner ads, pop ups, pop unders, etc, I’m in.
JumpTime’s a company that is looking at publisher’s data in different ways. Basically, they argue that the metrics publishers use (pageviews, hits, etc) are not telling the full picture.
Publishers can do pretty much the same, DiLorenzo said. JumpTime has found that measuring all the assets (story, video, photos, headlines and modules, like most emailed) on a page can help publishers get an exact revenue value for any piece of content. The company calculates the value of every piece of content in a publisher’s network in real time.
This represents a big change. Historically, publishers have put an emphasis on technology to help attract an audience (think SEO or SEM) and then looked to monetize that audience (think ad tech, targeting). The flaw in this, according to DiLorenzo, is that most of what a publisher does is present content in front of an audience. What they should be doing, she argues, is getting an audience to the content that is most valuable. It’s like weighing a ball player’s batting average to determine if a team is going to win games rather than just looking at the raw numbers.
Source: joshsternberg
Our badass new tv! (Taken with instagram)
What she and her colleagues found out was that [the number of mentions of a TV show in social media] was not a good predictor of popularity. Volume was more of a trailing indicator than a leading indicator. But Dispersion, or what Dina calls Entropy, turned out to be a very reliable leading indicator of popularity of a TV show. The wider and broader the discussion of the TV show went within online social media, the more likely the show was to become popular.
So the take away is that the more people talk about the different facets of a show in social media, the more popular the show will be.
As opposed to real life, where the more people talk about the different facets of a show in social media, the more popular the show will be.
A VC: Dispersion and Entropy In Social Media
The wider and broader the discussion of the TV show went within online social media, the more likely the show was to become popular.
(via tedr)
(via ericmortensen)
Source: avc.com
The sad face of a woman forced to send her new toy off to get resized.
The cries from the media blaming Apple for the conditions at Foxconn are getting out of hand. Blaming Apple solely for the problems at the factory is like blaming one car-maker for greenhouse gasses. It doesn’t make sense. There are many companies and many factors that make Foxconn what it is. Does Apple have a responsibility to the workers are Foxconn? Absolutely. However, I believe that Apple is doing more than any other company out there. They publish reports of audits and also detail things like what it’s doing to rid its products of dangerous chemicals. What are the other companies doing that even compares to Apple’s progress? We don’t really know, because nobody bothers to find out.
This is disingenuous at best. After more than a few days of talking about the astronomical profits that Apple hit in Q4, and then comparing it to everyone else, The Loop turns around and put them on equal footing when it comes to corporate responsibility? If they are making the most money from Foxconn’s exploitative practices, do they not bear more responsibility than most?
As The Loop has also pointed out many times, Apple products are copied every day. Do they not think that as industry leader that if they made a decisive statement, others would copy this as well?
I’m not saying that I disagree with The Loop. Exploitative Labor is something every single consumer embrases and endorses every time they purchase a product, especially a tech product. It’s up to all of us. But praising a company on one hand for doing everything right, and then saying they’re an easy target when criticism comes seems, as I said, disingenuous at best.
Apple’s an easy target, but you can’t blame them for Foxconn
Source: loopinsight.com
