Over the past few months, we’ve been engaging in a good deal of customer discovery. In order to monetize mobile consumers, it’s essential to know their online behaviors. To begin, we’ve found the most important behavior to recognize outright is their browsing behavior. Seattle-based Big Door Media (who help developers apply gaming mechanics to their sites or apps) divides the way users browse online into two modes: Commerce Mode and Entertainment Mode.
In Commerce Mode, users are actively pursuing information or something commerce related therefore monetization is likely. In Entertainment Mode, users are browsing for entertainment and monetizing the user is difficult. Think of how you behave on Google.com vs. AddictingGames.com, for example.
Explains Big Door:
“When they [users] go to Google they are generally in commerce mode and are specifically looking for something commerce related. Google asks them what they are looking for and does a stellar job of pointing them in the right direction and collects a few pennies for its trouble. But when a consumer is sitting on a game website playing the latest version of Diner Dash, they aren’t likely to stop playing that game and go book their next vacation simply because an annoying banner ad for travel showed up next to their game window.”
For example tube sites, which generate an enormous amount of traffic, are predicated on a fractional percentage of users funding their operation. Tens of millions of users, only thousands of clicks. This is how the majority of today’s entertainment sites monetize their traffic. As we set out to build our payment platform, we knew a different business model that is better adapted for consumers that are in Entertainment Mode needed to be developed. In our search we realized that the casual gaming industry has already pioneered new strategies that unlock greater revenue potential from entertainment-focused consumers.
Primarily, the virtual currency model used in so many successful casual and social games effectively creates a loyal economy that incites user engagement, rewards users with badges, points, or coins, and leverages social media to encourage virality. It’s our hypothesis that by applying these new strategies, entertainment apps will no longer have to solely rely on passive eCPM revenue, but instead achieve direct user monetization.
So how do you apply these new strategies to your apps? Stay tuned for our next installment to find out!
Next week
Using virtual currency to achieve direct user monetization.
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