Curse is one of the large gaming website companies you may have never heard of. The company gets over 1 billion page views per month on its owned and operated network of 45 gaming sites. It reaches over 50 million people monthly across its websites and Youtube channels. Curse has had success with gaming technology clients like Curse Voice (VoIP), which has over 1.7 million installs since launching in June 2014, and Curse Client, an add-on app that has over 6 million installs and over 2 million active users since launching in June 2009. Curse has built up a PC-centric gaming audience with a large audience of eSports fans. The company also has its own eSports division with Team Curse, which recently joined forces with Team Liquid. They have pros competing across all the major eSports games.
Now the company, which is headquartered in Huntsville, Alabama, has ventured into the mobile space for the first time. The app, {link no longer active} which launched with over 250,000 downloads, taps into EA Sports’ globally successful FIFA video game franchise and its most popular game mode, FIFA Ultimate Team. Donovan Duncan, vice president of marketing at Curse, reveals the company’s mobile ambitions in this exclusive interview.
Donovan Duncan, Vice President of marketing at Curse
Can you give us a sense of the size and reach of Curse gaming sites?
Curse does over 1 billion page views per month on its owned and operated websites. We reach about 50 million people per month with Websites and YouTube according to comscore. We expect mobile to add another significant percentage to this number by end of year 2015.
How popular is Futhead globally as a site?
Futhead is a massive site, which reaches 2 to 3 million people monthly on comscore, and is one of the top sites in the United Kingdom and many countries in the European Union.
What impact has FIFA Ultimate Team had on this site?
FIFA Ultima Team players are hardcore users who always want the best information, Futhead helps provide the best statistics from the game, and sourced from players.
How does Curse cross-promote this site with others it owns?
It’s a very unique audience, and it isn’t a traditional PC audience, but we do have a lot of crossover with our Madden Ultimate team website. Sports gamers normally stick to sports and fighting games, and we try and create an ecosystem for that.
What are your goals with the Fathead app?
Our users are very important to us and we want to provide them with the best Futhead experience possible. For some time now, mobile has been the fastest growing type of traffic that we receive.Rather than trying to shoehorn Futhead into a bad mobile web experience, we wanted to build an app that would provide users with all the power of Futhead right in the palm of their hand. Whether you’re playing FIFA on your console or out and about, we want a great Futhead experience to be right there with you. That’s our goal with the Futhead app.
Why are you just now entering the app space?
We wanted to make sure that we had a product that really catered to our users and was useful. Like everything we’ve built in the past, it has to be something we would use, and we would use to be better gamers. The Futhead App fits those requirements perfectly and we’re really proud that this is the first App that Curse will launch.
How popular do you see the Futhead app becoming at launch?
Right now about one-third of the traffic to the Futhead site is mobile, and there are a lot of people who have asked for something like this. We’re confident we’re going to end up with a million users over the course of the next year, and a very large group of early adopters in the first few weeks. Many of those users will continue to use the App for as long as they play the game or are fans of the sport.
How do you see apps enhancing your gaming sites and brands moving forward?
We are actively working on several apps to launch in 2015, some with publishers as partners, and some based on the data and information we have from our Websites. We know that today’s gamer is consuming more and more content on mobile, and we want to make sure that we always have the best solution and source for that content. Taking what we’ve built on the Web and moving more of that to be accessible easily to Apps is a natural progression for our company, and is going to make for much better user experiences for most of our major offerings.
Do you have any goals of how many apps you’d like to launch this year or annually?
2015 will see between four and six apps from Curse. We’ll have a mobile version coming out for iOS and Android of our communication software Curse Voice soon. Near the end of the year we plan to release a few different apps with publisher partners on projects that are still TBD.
Who’s developing your Curse apps?
We have been staffing up considerably the last 12 months, with over 40 new positions added in 2014, and even more than that coming in 2015. The mobile team at Curse is nearly completely staffed and we have the right people from each of our teams working with members of the mobile team to get more content into Apps.
