Discovery of mobile games (and other apps) is the key problem facing developers, who are seeing rising acquisition costs and well over a hundred different ad networks to work with. The challenge is getting good quality customers who like your game and will stick with it. If only you could give them a demo easily with no waiting! That’s where AppGlimpse comes in, using Agawi’s streaming technology to deliver game demos as part of in-app advertising.
It’s the logical next step in advertising, beyond a simple image or a short video to actual interactivity. The concept is that giving players a taste of the gameplay without having to download a game will increase the number of people who try the game out, and if they game is compelling a full download will follow.
Right now, AppGlimpse only works with Android versions of apps, but according to Agawi co-founder Peter Relan: “Given how fast Android is growing and the popularity of cross-platform tools like Unity, we think we should still be able to cover a ton of games.”
Initially, only games will be covered by this app, but future possibilities for other apps are not out of the question. In the meantime, having an in-game playable demo as an advertisement is a very tantalizing possibility for consumers looking to download new games.
We spoke with Agawi co-founder Rohan Relan about AppGlimpse and some of its features. Relan stressed the ease of use for developers.
“For publishers, integrating our SDK is as simple as integrating any other ad SDKs. Drop it in, add a few lines of code and you’re done,”Relan said. “Advertisers get the big win, though. Instead of spending time making a video, which is expensive and time consuming, they just give us the Android version of the game. We can stream that directly and time limit it to make a great 1 minute demo of the game.”
Relan noted that Agawi is also enabling deeper integrations, but their goal is to make basic integrations a snap.
The business model for AppGlimpse is still being developed.
“Part of the private beta is to work with developers to figure out the appropriate business model,” Relan said. “We’re starting with a traditional CPI model, but that may evolve as we get more feedback from developers. Since this is a completely new ad unit that hasn’t been done before, there’s a lot of discovering to do.”
Relan noted the flexibility of AppGlimpse. “Publishers can integrate our SDK to have the demos in the app,” Relan said. “As we get feedback from publishers, we’re going to start enabling additional features, like internal cross-promo, new form factors, etc.”
Agawi is also looking to work with ad networks as well as publishers. “We’re definitely open to partnering with ad networks so we can put this out in front of as many developers and users as possible,” Relan pointed out.
Performance is good, showing the experience Agawi has gained with years of working on streaming technology.
“We’ve been streaming games on mobile for over three years, so we’re really good at it,” said Relan. “In decent environments, it works really well. We make sure that the user has a good connection before we show the ad so we know they’ll have a good experience.”
That does come with some caveats, however. According to Relan, “That said, games that very high twitch are probably not ideal, so we might not be doing Bit Trip Runner on day 1. But most games don’t fall into that category and should demo very nicely on our platform.”
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Source: Agawi {link no longer active}
